My parents insisted on buying a PC for home use. It was mainly so they could do accounting for their business at home. I had a friend who had an Amiga and I spent pretty much as much time as possible at their house using it. We even had an Amiga only store in our local mall (in the U.S.!).
I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs.
The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized than Amigas.
What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just felt more creative and fun to me.
Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to hunt around for the next system.
Amiga "owned" the TV market for a long time because it happened to get some important products first (Video Toaster for example).
Apple got better desktop publishing tools first.
E.g. if you wanted to do TV you during some period would want a product like the Video Toaster. If you wanted to do newspapers, you'd want Quark.
While there may have been certain platform quirks that tilted the initial creation of those tools in one direction or another (such as genlock support for video for the Amiga), platform mattered far less than application, and early application traction in a niche would paper over a lot of other platform issues.
WYSIWYG output for printing was largely still an application issue, not a platform issue, for example. Exactly for those kinds of reasons, an application lead also translated to a platform lead for those kind of niches where people would buy the platform to support an application rather than the other way around. People would buy Quark, and a Mac to run it, not pick a system and see what desktop publishing would run on it. If you loved the Amigas pre-emptive multitasking and "colourful" (compared to the Mac..) environment, tough - it couldn't run Quark (been there - had exactly that discussion back in those days).
Regarding PPC, note that the PPC cards for the Amiga appeared after Commodore had already gone bankrupt, as far as I know. At least PowerUP first appeared in '97 after Amiga Technologies announced Amiga going PPC in '95. It'd been largely obvious the game was over at least from 95-96 even for most die-hard supporters.
Interestingly, had Commodore continued it's clear the next generation Amigas would have most likely been different - the prototype "Hombre" chipset was a SOC that included a HP PA-RISC core [1]. Interestingly Commodore apparently choice PA-RISC primarily with the intent of being able to run Windows NT (at the time of the decision, the lower priced PPC - and MIPS - alternatives were not supported for NT) - something which would have been massively controversial with a lot of Amiga users.
The Apple II family straddled the divide between work and play pretty well, though it was probably more of a play machine in later years. In 1988, when I was almost 8 years old, my parents bought an Apple IIGS as our first computer. My mother, who is an accountant, ran accounting software on that machine, but the rest of us also had a lot of fun with it, in both the 8-bit Apple II emulation mode and the 16-bit native mode. A couple of years later, she bought a PC. Whether it was so she could have better accounting software, or just the same accounting software as her colleagues, or because the rest of us liked the GS so much, I don't know. I don't think she ever told me directly. In any case, the net result was that I could spend more time on the GS, both playing around and learning to program. Of course, my siblings spent quite a bit of time playing games on the GS as well.
I didn't know anyone with an Amiga, and there weren't any at school. The only Commodore machine I ever got my hands on was my paternal grandfather's Commodore 64, which seemed quite limited compared to the Apple IIGS we had at home. From what I've read, it seems that the Amiga had better graphics than the GS. And of course, the Amiga's processor was faster, unless one added an accelerator card to the GS, which we never did. The GS's sound chip (an Ensoniq) was more advanced in some ways; it had 32 oscillators. But samples had to be stored in that chip's own RAM, and there was only 64K of that. Still, there were a few good trackers for the GS; the best one was NoiseTracker from the FTA.
"What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac."
The Mac had a couple years head start on Amiga, and Apple had a pretty large brand name and relationship with retailers that catered to businesses than Commodore did. By 1985, Commodore (despite the CBM name) was fairly synonymous with games. There were games for Apple as well (Macs, IIe, etc) but there wasn't as much of a stigma of Apple as a 'game computer company' at that point.
And... it cost more. We all know when something costs more it must be better, right? ;)
"Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc."
Basically that. Whenever you wonder why something "odd" gets a foothold, look for the money trail.
One thing to note is that there was a couple of Amiga variants that lived on in broadcast media, as it was very capable of doing video work.
BTW, the BYOD kinda happened back in the day as well. There is a claim that accountants brought their personal AppleII to work so they didn't have to fight for mainframe time.
Edit: oh, and i wonder how much the dock connector had to say for the long term uptake of iPhone in the corporate world. Never mind that Apple was quick to offer a WSUS like service to handle app rollouts.
The old saw goes VisiCalc sold more Apples than Apples sold VisiCalc. Of course then Lotus 1-2-3 came on to the market and even MultiCalc struggled to compete with that.
There never was a high volume machine that really used the '040 to its potential. The Next Cube was pretty good and there was an Alpha from DEC with it as well but that chip would have been a very nice one to have in a machine like the ST Falcon, in the end it was mostly heat (or powerconsumption if you wish) that killed it rather than that it didn't have the raw performance.
I seem to recall that right around the time Intel released the 80486 they started getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4. The fastest 68040 maxed out at what...40Mhz, while the 486 ended up somewhere at 150Mhz or so.
But the low volumes definitely hurt Motorola's ability to keep up with Intel's R&D. Clock for clock, the 68k architecture was faster, but Intel figured out how to throw a lot more clocks at the problem and they kept doing that until PowerPCs were not really a consumer-level home computer chip anymore.
> getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4
For those reading who aren't old timers, this needs to be elaborated on.
This wasn't any trick or sleight on Intel's part. The parts really did run 2x as fast or 4x as fast internally. That was a major achievement. An instruction that took 5 clocks to execute at 33 MHz took 5 clocks to execute at 50 MHz and took 5 clocks to execute at 100 MHz. This was all accomplished over a relatively brief period of time compared to today's rate of CPU speed advancements.
What slowed the CPU down was the growing mismatch between the internal operation and the external memory bus which continued to run at (usually) 33 MHz. It was possible to run the external bus at 50 MHz but most designs didn't. The 8K byte on-chip cache helped mitigate the mismatch.
>> The parts really did run 2x as fast or 4x as fast internally.
Actually, the Intel 486DX4 ran at only 3x the speed, despite the name. Intel couldn't use the DX3 name because of a trademark owned by AMD, who also had a part called the Am486DX4. The AMD part was also available with a 40MHz bus and a tripled 120MHz CPU clock.
By the time Intel sold > 66 MHz 486's, the Pentium was already out. They remained a low end alternative, but still topped out at 100 MHz. AMD took their 486 clone (called the 5x86) eventually up to 150 MHz.
Which also reminded me that it probably didn't help that UNIX workstation vendors often replaced 68K with their own RISC architecture. MIPS was a attempt at a standard, but...
I think if they could have got a version of the Amiga into the same price range as a video game console, they probably would have been ok. The pricing at PC levels meant it was a "family" decision and the PC was going to get picked.
The other problem is the Amiga never had Adobe as a developer. That would have made a huge difference.
They were pretty much doomed by then. Plus the fun quote from the Wikipedia article "Ultimately, Commodore was not able to meet demand for new units because of component supply problems." Lovely.
Jay Miner was lost that same year. It is just so sad.
I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs.
The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized than Amigas.
What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just felt more creative and fun to me.
Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to hunt around for the next system.