[Coco] CoCo4! 50% done!

[Nick Marentes]

Mark Marlette <mmarlette at ...> writes:

> So what is reasonable? $100, $200, $400??? What is reasonable to one is
unreasonable to another.
> 
> The amount NRE involved in the development of these platforms is
staggering.... If Altera is charging what
> they are for their DE-1 or SOCs can you imagine what the pricing would be
for each on a 100 unit run?


What we're looking at is a price that most people would be prepared to pay
in order to get enough units out there to encourage software development of
new products.

That is not a price based on what the cost to develop and produce but what
the market percieves it to be worth to them.

The reality is that even $400 is really a reasonable price. I remember
paying around $400 for my CoCo3 back in the 80's and that didn't include a
disk drive, so the FPGA CoCo is good value considering it has SD card
storage, more colors and runs much faster.

But are people prepared to pay that for a retro hobby computer when you can
buy a laptop with built in LCD and hard drive for less nowadays?

I think the magic price point is somewhere in the vicinity of $200. Anything
more than that and people will question what they really want it for when
there is no software that particularly uses the new features.

Nick