I would ask that you get your ocular system a check-up, because I don't think you're seeing all the cool and amazing things the rest of the world is seeing.
I'll make an appointment to see my eye doctor next week. ("Dr. Smith, can you make the things I see look amazing to me?")
Oh, and by-the-way, the MBA and my MacBook have four times the pixels as the A500's ECS 640x400 (non-square pixels) also the high res format was limited to 4-bit color or 16 colors on screen.
True. I was thinking 2x horizontal and 2x vertical is 2x. It seems I need a mathematical checkup too. Still, 4x display resolution is not a great advance in 20 years. (my A500 ECS is overscan 692x482 by the way)
The Amiga's chipset, while amazing in its time, cannot do the realtime OpenGL 3D compositing that the Mac do for even the simplest finder window. A little chip in a laptop computer can do 3D realtime transformations of pictures and moving video. The technology to do this was introduced and sold in the early 1980's as a device called the Ampex ADO (Ampex Digital Optics) These boxes took up the space of a small refrigerator, consumed thousands of watts and cost $100,000. Each box could handle exactly ONE channel of SD video. As you gang-up more channels, you can see how the costs can go up. They too were amazing for their time.
Yes, but if the technology was introduced in the early 1980's, then it's not really something new - over the last 25 years it's just gradually gotten cheaper and smaller. (It's hard to blow somebody's mind if it takes 25 years to do it
)
I still have my Amiga 2000 that I had set up with all sorts of cool stuff. It seemed cool until I realized that I had spent over $10,000 (1994 dollars) on all of the hardware and software. Lets see, 24bit VGA style graphics card? That was over $600. GVP 68040 CPU card? Almost $2000.
My 1987 Amiga 500 cost me $799 CAD + $1100 for extras over the years (24-bit, display, audio/video digitizers, SD flash, accelerator, RAM, software). For around the same price I can get a Mac which will do basically the same things (internet/email, documents, images, music, games, productivty, development). The new Mac is faster, slightly higher-res, and has 3D realtime effects & video. These things are nice, but not really a giant leap in technology over 20 years. I want something to come out that "blows my mind", not something that makes me shrug and go "meh."
If the new Macbook Air had 1920x1200 OLED display (13"), SSD drive as standard, 4Gb RAM, 4-core 3Ghz CPU that stays cool, graphics chip at least 50% faster than previous notebook graphics, 12-hour battery, and cost $1499 - then it would have blown me away. With technology moving so slowly, I don't expect to see that until at least 2012.
