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Batch 7 already so more than 3000 preorders right now.

I couldn't care less about this product (well not at this price at least), but if it works for them AND helps bring some more retro-computing goodness, or even some brand new one in line with their past greatness, who am I to say it isn't ok?

@Turrican3

Exactly that.

It was interesting to watch the overall negative tone of threads (and discord) turn positive on a dime when people realized sales figures held more weight than their own opinion of the viability of the product.

#6

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OneTimer1 Quote:

First world problems and most of them are US specific and made in the USA.

Memory shortages due to AI are a global problem. Maybe data centers are not going up in most of the EU because of high energy prices due to political choices. Northern Europe has cooler weather providing free cooling, a cost advantage, and Norway at least was smart enough not to join the EU so is not limited by EU energy policies. EU heavy industry, mostly in Germany, is declining because of green energy policies making energy more expensive although it is being partially replaced by higher tech R&D and manufacturing. The EU and UK have doubled down on green energy which is more expensive often outsourcing energy intensive "dirty" products but any improvement in energy security is more than offset by product reliance elsewhere. While so much global production has switched to Asia, much of the energy came from the Middle East although Asian nations are currently diversifying their sources of energy for energy security reasons. America, and not just the US, is providing a larger percentage of global energy needs despite longer distances. Some energy intensive production is moving here also, partially due to tariffs as well. There are AI centers going up all over the US including near me. There are places here where natural gas is free as it is a byproduct of oil extraction and some areas do not have pipelines to move it where it is needed. There is also push back in some places to building AI data centers because of noise, potential to increase energy costs locally and lack of adequate power infrastructure nearby. The same is true in northern Europe as well. It is likely that all the planned AI build out will not happen because of lack of energy and energy infrastructure not to mention a likely hype driven bubble in AI.

Not much of the Apple iPhone is produced or assembled in the US. The Corning Gorilla glass is about it although TSMC chip production may eventually be partially moved here and would diversify supply chains. Production and assembly is almost all done in Asia while R&D is done in the US. Apple is a fabless semiconductor developer but not as vertically integrated as Commodore after acquiring MOS and at least one US based chip foundry, which turned into a liability. I am no huge Apple fan as they are a mixed bag. They make high quality aesthetically pleasing products which are easy to use which I like but their products are proprietary and expensive which I do not like. I bought Apple stock during a pullback as it approached a one trillion USD market cap with some investors worried that a one trillion market cap was too big for a growing business. I usually avoid growth stocks choosing to invest in higher dividend paying stocks than the ~1.5% dividend yield as I recall but their cash per share is what persuaded me. They were practically a bank and producing more successful products than flops, even if Asian copycat competitors were taking market share. Chances were high that they could innovate new products, rely on brand strength and increase cash flow from subscriptions. Apple is a $4.1 trillion USD business today and there are 16 publicly traded businesses with a $1+ trillion USD market cap showing how irrational it was to believe that a $1 trillion market cap business was too big to grow. The Apple (AAPL) stock price is up 1,972% since that time but the dividend yield is now only 0.38% which is back in growth stock territory. They have increased their dividend but the dividend yield goes down as the price goes up. I usually look for a higher dividend yield and play the safer compounding interest game.

Early Chevron stock investors now earn 12.1% dividend yield
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/early-chevron-cvx-stock-investors-now-earn-a-12-1-dividend-yield

I have owned CVX longer than in this article and some stock purchases are earning a higher compound dividend yield than this. These "dirty" energy businesses have been defunded by the energy policies of some nations and are out of favor with investors which provides a contrarian buying opportunity with a 4%+ starting dividend. They are contracting with businesses building AI data centers including recently Microsoft.

CAT | CVX | GEV | MSFT | Chevron Signs 20-Year Power Agreement with Microsoft for West Texas Data Center
https://www.reddit.com/r/StockTitan/comments/1ucilw9/cat_cvx_gev_msft_chevron_signs_20year_power/

I own CAT and GEV too but not MSFT. I am likely up a higher percentage with CAT than APPL if counting compounded dividends because the dividend yield was substantially higher when I bought it. Both CAT and GEV have been good plays on the AI boom while "dirty" energy stocks like CVX trade like energy is not the limiting factor in the AI boom. I know investors who are up more in Mag 7 growth stocks and have made more than me in the stock market by the way.

OneTimer1 Quote:

I never bought a mobile over 200€ I never bought something from Apple I never bought something from Musk Most people are spending to much money on things they don't really need.

I am afraid not only rising memory prices are global but inflation is global and you may not be able to get much of a "mobile" smartphone for less than 200€ before too long. With that attitude, you may end up as an opa giving 1€ to kinder with them trying to figure out what they can buy with it.

#6 Quote:

It was interesting to watch the overall negative tone of threads (and discord) turn positive on a dime when people realized sales figures held more weight than their own opinion of the viability of the product.

The Callback had a good first day that was better than expected and better than the C64U but this result is relative. The C64DTV sold 70,000 units the first day for example. Still pretty good for mostly social media grassroots marketing and pre-orders with the product potentially not finished yet. The C64U was a known working product and the Callback is boosted by its success but there are more unknowns.

Last edited by matthey on 01-Jul-2026 at 01:37 AM.

@matthey

Quote:

The Callback had a good first day that was better than expected and better than the C64U but this result is relative. The C64DTV sold 70,000 units the first day for example.

True. But is it not also relative that the C64DTV sold for 25 USD that day? Surely when you analyze "profit", this narrows the gap in comparing these 2 sales events.

The thrust of my short post was simply about money raised anyway.

btw-since Jeri as designer of the C64DTV is also now advisor to Commodore, doesn't that count more as a plus as well?

#6

Last edited by number6 on 01-Jul-2026 at 02:02 AM.

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#6 Quote:

True. But is it not also relative that the C64DTV sold for 25 USD that day? Surely when you analyze "profit", this narrows the gap in comparing these 2 sales events.

They are different. The $25 USD in 2004 would be ~$44 USD today but more importantly there is a difference in the price and performance of entry level hardware. There was not as much competition then or as cheap of gaming hardware. The PS1 was ~$100 but the PS2 offered more value at ~$200. The SNES and successor N64 had been selling for ~$100 but were discontinued in 2003 as the GameCube reached a similar price. None of the ~$100 competitors include anywhere near the number of value added games. The C64DTV price and number of included built in games was very competitive and influential as it could be considered the beginning of minis except done right with an ASIC. Commodore was a better recognized brand name then and there was no RPI replacing Commodore and producing affordable computers for the masses.

#6 Quote:

The thrust of my short post was simply about money raised anyway.

This is a good point and another difference. The Callback pre-orders may be more like crowd funding of a project rather than sales of a finished product like the C64DTV. This funding method removes some of the risk of small volume production and is not unusual in the retro market as RGL uses it too. There is a time value of money which some potential customers realize and avoid pre-orders like this but there are others who say take my money.

#6 Quote:

btw-since Jeri as designer of the C64DTV is also now advisor to Commodore, doesn't that count more as a plus as well?

If Jeri is so involved, where is the Commodore augmented reality glasses with built in phone, WiFi and Bluetooth? Wait, would that be digital immersion instead of digital detox?

Last edited by matthey on 01-Jul-2026 at 03:49 AM.

@matthey

Quote:

EU heavy industry, mostly in Germany, is declining because of green energy policies making energy more expensive although it is being partially replaced by higher tech R&D and manufacturing.

Yet green energy itself is vastly cheaper, however imposing levies on polluting energy tech funds the transitions so its a mere roadbump.

@number6

Quote:

It was interesting to watch the overall negative tone of threads (and discord) turn positive on a dime when people realized sales figures held more weight than their own opinion of the viability of the product.

That's more than a bit condescending #6. Snarky if you prefer.

I'm just catching up with this Commodore purchase thing myself, and I'd summarise the negative tone as:

1. Christian has previously criticised such tie ins (no idea if he has; I find his Youtube output irritating and not to my taste, YMMV) so looks like a hypocrite.

2. People don't the lecture about digital detox.

3. It's diminished the "brand" (not that much could to be frank, a rapidly drying puddle of interest) and is not the revival people wanted to see.

4. It's massively overpriced for what it is.

5. A smaller amount of "not viable".

Personally I don't find 7k units on order to be massive. You could sell tens of thousands of Commodore branded boomerangs.

Where the "turn around" is happening in views I'd summarise it as people feeling that if it means the loan can be paid back or potentially fund something that isn't shovelware in the future.

Let's see what happens if and when people actually get it en-masse.


It does look quite nasty to me, but then so did the original C64.

@number6

Quote:

It was interesting to watch the overall negative tone of threads (and discord) turn positive on a dime when people realized sales figures held more weight than their own opinion of the viability of the product.

Regarding all the naysayers, I'm reminded of what Teddy Roosevelt once said:

"It is not the critic who counts" (a must listen if you haven't heard it before)

As for me, I'd rather cheer on the Man in the Arena (Mr. Fractic et. al.), knowing full well that victory is never a guarantee. Either way - daring greatly is the point.

Last edited by jingof on 03-Jul-2026 at 08:55 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 03-Jul-2026 at 04:53 PM.

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@number6

my personal view does not change just because of the sales. I do not see the market where it fits but there seem to be people attracted by it and willing to buy. Good for Commodore because otherwise Commodore would have been at the end already

@simplex

Quote:

simplex wrote: @cdimauro Quote: That's mostly true. Sicily was the land of conquerors: we had plenty on them in our history, and each one brought new genes, so we have a mixed population. That's why part of our population has a darker skin (we had 200 years of Arabs domination). But we're also very used to "color" taking the Sun during the spring/summer time. Northern Italy had its fair share of conquerors, too. Lombardy, after all. But, fair enough, those conquerors were fair-skinned and blond. My mother's paese has a lot of dark-skinned folk, too, though they're a bit north of Naples, and a lot of the darker-skinned folk are farmers. But I always had the impression that Italians in general, or at least those from around Tuscany on down, start with an olive-hued, "Mediterranean" skin (I call it) which is more likely to brown in the Italian sun, even without sunscreen, rather than the pale or pinkish skin further up north which is more likely to redden, even with sunscreen. (I had the opportunity to witness this on my last visit...)

Correct. There are clear differences between northern and southern people, albeit the situation is more mixed compared to the far past.
Quote:

Quote: BTW, I'm a citizen (I was born in Connecticut), but I'm Sicilian. And my mother language is the mixed Sicilian-American that you can hear on movies like The God father (especially the second one). Neapolitan sometimes makes sense to me, because my ancestors speak a variant of it, only not quite so heavy on the consonants. (Heard a Neapolitan pensioner on the train recently complaining about his pension, and the t's and c's were too much to take.) I doubt I would understand Sicilian, but I thought I understood almost everything in the Godfather films just fine, so maybe it's not that different -- or maybe they cleaned it up a bit. Nun sacce ch'altre aggia di', ne che puozze.

LOL

Yes, you can understand a good part because the two languages share a lot.
Quote:

Quote: so not only your English is broken, but your Italian too. Despite what the Italian version of a Yankee might claim, neither Neapolitan nor Sicilian are Italian, itself is a language assembled from Florentine (Dante) and Lombard (Manzoni) that somehow, despite its freakishly Frankenstein origins, sounds quite beautiful when placed in the correct mouth.

Almost correct, with an important thing to highlight: the Florentine school drew on the older Sicilian school (from which the famous sonnet also originated).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_painting
Quote:

simplex wrote: @MEGA_RJ_MICAL Quote: Friend Simplex you misunderstood me: the second paragraph was aimed at that malformed goblin cdimauro. Friend Mega (if I may call you such) you misunderstand me: I did not misunderstand you; I was just clarifying that cdimauro's lingua siciliana is not broken. Not as far as I know, anyway. I am not skilled in Sicilian, so maybe it is. My point was simply that lingua siciliana is not lingua italiana, let alone lingua franca, which is a broken language.

*

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: cdimauro Quote: That's the most interesting part (which I've highlighted) of all stories about Commodore that I've read 'til now. The days of ‘read my lips, no new chips’ are a distant memory... Developers or at least consultants at the new Commodore like Dave want to give Commodore a 2nd chance doing it right this time.

That wasn't the point of my previous comment. To me it was very important to highlight a confession from one of the most important Commodore engineers, which candidly admitted that engineers were the ones cheating to the management.
Quote:

Unfortunately, they do not have much retro tech that can be modernized without the Amiga. They are stuck with rebranding non related to Commodore products and trying a retro angle to modern tech but this digital detox flip phone is more restricted modern bloat with a retro facade. I do not believe it will sell enough to the enthusiastic 8-bit retro crowd but maybe there are enough wealthy grandparents out there that still remember Commodore, want a simplified phone, like LEDs and still have good enough vision to see the small screen to make it a market success. Branding is cheap and it increases sales but bad products can tarnish the brand. Christian is not as hard headed as original Commodore leadership and has successfully pivoted once already so we will see what happens.

I don't expect that much to come: they'll just try to sell some products under The Name to milk some money from the foolish.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: kolla Quote: So what with the amiga do you consider "modern"? The 68k Amiga has a SoC like system design with CPU, interrupt controller, timers, DMA, blitter and copper coprocessors, video display controller, audio, I/O support, etc.

Yes, but many things are obsolete and certainly cannot be considered "modern".
Quote:

Commodore had fallen behind at enhancing the 68k Amiga but chunky graphics and 16-bit 8 channel audio were planned and are already implemented in FPGA cores like SAGA along with digital video display output.

Packed/chunky pixels on SAGA work on a different display controller compared to the original one in the Amiga. So, it's essentially a patchwork and quite different from what Commodore was planning with the AA+ and AAA.
Quote:

The 1979 68000 with 32-bit ISA has a large flat 4 GiB address space instead of common at the time 64 kiB address space requiring bank switching, 32-bit registers and 32-bit datatypes. Replacing the 68k 32-bit embedded market king with a non compressed fat PPC for the embedded market was one of the dumbest business mistakes in the history of computers, right up there with IBM choosing the 8088 instead of 68000.

That's not correct: the 68000 wasn't a real contender for being selected by IBM for its PC.
Quote:

I believe the 68k Amiga with enhancements and modern silicon could be competitive in areas. There are areas where it is currently far from competitive like the desktop market. The 68k Amiga was designed to be upgraded though which has few limits given enough time of incremental upgrades moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, Amiga leadership prefers to live in Amiga Neverland where 68k Amiga opportunity after opportunity slip away like a bad dream. The PPC AmigaNOne is the dumbest product ever as it misses the one market where the Amiga does not need to be modern which is the retro market but attempts to be desktop hardware with the poorly suited for the desktop AmigaOS which is the one part of the Amiga they kept while using embedded PPC hardware that is less suitable for the embedded market and cheaper small memory footprint hardware than the 68k.

I don't get what do you want to achieve. A revival of the Amiga for competing with the current market, or an enhanced Amiga for the retro world?

In the first case, there are many things that need to be removed, rewritten or rethought, because the Amiga, as it was designed and as it is, it's very obsolete (especially its OS). So, not competitive in the modern times.

In the second case, there's plenty of space for good enhancements.

@Clapper

Quote:

Clapper wrote: @matthey Quote: EU heavy industry, mostly in Germany, is declining because of green energy policies making energy more expensive although it is being partially replaced by higher tech R&D and manufacturing. Yet green energy itself is vastly cheaper,

"Sure": I can clearly see it on my bills (after so many investments in the last years from my salary)...
Quote:

however imposing levies on polluting energy tech funds the transitions so its a mere roadbump.

Imposing taxes for so many years without a rational plan is the real problem, because the situation here in Germany isn't that good as you might think about.

Angela Merkel failed having no plan B besides the "green" investments and relying on Russia's gas.

Who came after her failed even more, because the Green Party was part of the government coalition, and they preferred to reopen some coal-fired power stations instead of the nuclear plants, greatly increasing the pollution, CO2, and the prices of the energy: everything but not the hated nuclear.

The new government... doesn't know how to do 1 + 1. It has no concrete idea on how to solve the energy problem which is still affecting the country (the heavy industry in Germany is the most important one and needs a stable power grid and cheap prices for the energy. Which only the nuclear energy can provide, including HUGE benefits for the CO2 reductions).
Mertz is only busy trying to cut the rights of the workers to accomplish his idiotic right-wingy agenda, mimicking the Milei in some aspects.

@cdimauro

Indeed... Instead of improving nuclear so that it can become a safer and cleaner energy, let's just forget it and all that was already invested

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Quote:

@cdimauro Indeed... Instead of improving nuclear so that it can become a safer and cleaner energy, let's just forget it and all that was already invested

Friend pixie please don't feed the goblin.

/m!

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@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: I don't get what do you want to achieve. A revival of the Amiga for competing with the current market, or an enhanced Amiga for the retro world? In the first case, there are many things that need to be removed, rewritten or rethought, because the Amiga, as it was designed and as it is, it's very obsolete (especially its OS). So, not competitive in the modern times. In the second case, there's plenty of space for good enhancements.

Some clarifications about this.

Amiga is an obsolete/legacy platform: it's not modern and cannot be (fully?) modernized due to design decisions.

The 68k CPUs
- Had issues scaling-up with the frequencies, likely due to the more complicate instructions opcodes & instructions themselves. That was also reported by Mitch Alsup. It doesn't mean that it can't scale, but it doesn't do it in competitive ways (e.g. reaching similar operative frequencies in similar microarchitectures).
Motorola tried to simplify as much as possible the architecture by cutting a lot of features and instructions (even in user mode), generating incompatibilities (with the previously written software) on every new architecture which it introduced. Nevertheless, scaling was always a problem.
So, it looks like that it's an intrinsic problem of the architecture which cannot be solved, otherwise Motorola would have done it (well, it has tried with the Coldfire "big 68k cut" family, which reached respectable high frequencies on comparable microarchitecures).
- Lack a more modern FPU with more registers (8 are too few for modelling many problems).
- Lack a SIMD/Vector unit.
- Lack binary instructions with 3 operands and unary instructions with 2 operands. Some, very useful, ternary instructions with 4 operands would be good to have as well. Those will reduce the number of executed instructions, with a benefit on performance.
- Lack many modern instructions (hash, crypto, population bits, ) which help a lot the performances.
- Lack a 64-bit architecture.
- Lack matrix unit.
- No Hardware Threading
- No Multicore .
...

The chipsets
- Have prehistoric components like the CIAs for managing I/O and timers. 8 bit and 0.7Mhz isn't a great match with modernity.
- 8 bit for mouse movements is too little.
- Are focused on 16-bit (many fields have this size, whereas at least 32-bit values would be needed).
- Lack support for 64-bit.
- Lack support for PCI/PCI-Express.
- Use planar graphics instead of packed/chunky.
- Don't support more than 8 bit per colour component.
- Don't support HDR.
- Audio is limited to 4 8-bit channels and limited frequencies.
- Audio frequencies are bound / dependent from the resolution used.
- No advanced 2D graphics primitives.
- No 3D.
- No advanced storage support (SSD, NVMe).
- No USB.
...

The OSes
- Totally bound to the chipset.
- Completely unsecure.
- Single address space shared by all applications, and including the OS.
- No process & thread concepts (I mean: modern concepts of those terms).
- No multiple users.
- No fine grained permissions.
- Stack is manually defined and an application can crash or produce weird results if there's not enough stack.
- 31-bit address space (2GB max memory).
- No 64-bit support
- No modern PMMU
- No SMT/SMP
- No virtual memory
- No hardware security (trusted computing, secure enclave)
...

I'm certainly missing something, but I think that the message is clear. Many things can be fixed, but some cannot, and some introduce binary incompatibilities. But the platform remain obsolete and not competitive with the more modern ones.


That's all about "modernity" but, and as I've said before, looking at the retro market then this platform can have A LOT which can be added while retaining the binary compatibility with the existing OSes and software.

Last edited by cdimauro on 28-Jul-2026 at 06:31 PM.

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: .... I don't get what do you want to achieve. A revival of the Amiga ... ....

Answering yourself is a nice way of keeping the OT discussion going.

Especially because none of the projects form Perifractic / Commodore are related to the Amiga.

@OneTimer1

Quote:

Especially because none of the projects form Perifractic / Commodore are related to the Amiga.

True atm, but they are related to IP of the Amiga (corporation).

#6

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CDIPADDING

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