Thanks for everyones messages. I can see from this and other posts the sort of issues around the idea of a new machine. From my perspective its more of a case of.. the necessity of a new machine rather than whats in it. a small box running cubase with inbuilt midi without the need for carting a tower about with all sorts of adaptors hanging off it.
On the other hand.. on the general distaste for x86 hardware it too seems to me to be the only viable option. For the last 5 years every platform has been significantly underpowered compared to the x86. At present we see 3GHz x86 machines whilst apple is still offering sub 1GHz machines. We've seen ARM get out of the hardware business. We see ALPHA gone. Motorola has pretty well exited the desktop market. And as I type this the gap between x86 and the rest is widening. I read an intel roadmap indicating 10GHz x86 chips by 2006. We've had Milan, Hades etc come and stay or go. There simply hasnt been a low cost machine, regardless of whats in it placed on the market. Meanwhile we've had both microsoft and apple change operating systems, both relying on emulation to get backwards compatibility. We've got java all over the net running on virtual machines (read: emulators). I can compile stonx on win2k but I can't run it under its emulator though!
So whilst I dont know what/if any future machines do arrive.. I do know it will be emulated. The question is whether people can/will buy it at a reasonable price. My personal feeling is we should use what hardware we can and package it in a way that makes it unique. Then spend the bulk of the time getting the OS and tools running right.
Its not a viable option in my opinion for anyone to enter the desktop market these days pushing a proprietry hardware platform. What PPC boards have emerged recently are all based on about a 4 year old IBM standard... and based on the Articia chipset with similar specs to boards 4 years old. Its a safe bet where they will be in a few years.
