The AmigaOne board is to be 'open availability' - that is available at the same price and under the same conditions to any bona fide Amiga dealer worldwide. There will be no territorial 'exclusives' either in the UK or elsewhere.
How does this work in practice? Well the development and manufacturing sides of the AmigaOne are being undertaken by a consortium of companies, including Eyetech's industrial systems division, Escena (for the PCI/Amiga interface) and others. There is open accounting between consortium members and a contractual undertaking as to how the costs, risks and margins on the manufacture of the boards will be shared, and on the cost price to dealers. The prime concern of the development/manufacturing consortium will be to make sure as many boards as possible are sold in order to recover development costs and generate economies of scale.
All dealers, whether existing competitors, partners or otherwise, of any of the manufacturing consortium, will be able to buy the AmigaOne at exactly the same price as Eyetech's retail division does. This will ensure wide availability and price competition amongst the dealers and the best deal for end users. The only constraint on dealers is that each dealer will need to buy boards in minimum quantities of units, cash with order, and have at least one physical, named person able to support end users who buy the product. Dealer margins at recommended end user prices are sufficient for the dealers to be able to provide this level of support.
The manufacturing consortium will sell bare boards to dealers, for them to add their own SDRAM, I/O & graphics cards, cases, storage etc.
Individual dealers will have the option of what specification to buy from us. We expect that most dealers will sell both the AmigaOne boards and fully towered, ready to roll systems. They will be able to buy an ATX tower of their choice, or one from the special range we have commissioned from Naya Design. If they wish to sell a system with an AmigaOne and A1200 integrated in the same case (necessary to run non-retargetable applications under OS4) our EZTower Mk5 (which is available at trade oprices to dealers) is probably the most suitable, ready made solution. As far as Eyetech's retail operations are concerned we will certainly offering both 'board-only' upgrades and custom built ready-to-run systems.
