[Someone]

The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.

[fulafel]

It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.

[Someone]

> and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992)

About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)”, and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany”. Both were on sale for about 2 years.

In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its commercial availability.

So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I think/guess was an expanding market for personal computers.

⇒ I don’t think those improvements made much of a difference.

[gpderetta]

3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600 replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.

[vidarh]

The A3000 was more than twice as expensive. The A4000 even more expensive. They were not mass market machines.

Variants of the A2000 continued in the market after the A3000 was released, such as the A2500, so people who didn't need the upgrades - or could make use of them (e.g. the VideoToaster didn't fit in the A3000 case without modifications) would continue to buy cheaper models.

[fulafel]

.. And the 1992 Amiga 600 and 1993 1200 sold 193k/95k. The volume was always in the A500 form factor machines that used a TV as the display half the time.

Commodore's focus on low cost stuff (in their own way) while PC clones managed to push the HDD+SVGA setup price down was a critical factor for how things turned out I think. In the high end there was also Apple, Macintosh had launched a year before the Amiga and made the professional GUI market harder to enter.

But the fateful focus also let the masses have access to a great hacker's computer growing up, without the vibe satirized by "Office Space" that marked the Microsoft platforms.