Commodore Advert - October 1991

The Amiga 1500 appears to be considered very much the mystery. It was essentially a cut-down version of the existing Amiga 2000, but shipped with an extra - but empty - CPU slot, only 1MB memory and two floppy drives, but no hard disk.

It was built only for the UK market and there appeared to be no obvious reason for its existence, although it has been speculated that it was an attempt to cut off competition from an unauthorised variant called the A1500+ from Checkmate Computers^[1].

The 1500+ was simply an Amiga 500 mounted in a case, which made it much more expandable with memory and a hard disk, so putting it directly into the territory of Commodore's top-of-the-range and significantly more expensive A2000, hence why Commodore would want it out of the way.

There is another theory kicking around though, which is that perhaps Commodore simply had a lot of floppy disk units it wanted to get rid of.

The 1500 model number had not been sanctioned by Commodore UK's parent - Commodore International Limited. However, it was definitely in keeping with the wilfully confusing numbering scheme that Commodore's marketing department seemed to be using at the time.

This led to situations like the Amiga 600, which was meant to have been the cheaper A300 but ended up being more expensive and so was numbered A600 instead^[2], or the 1500 itself - based initially on the 2000 but later redesigned to be closer to the 500, which it seemed to be both better than as well as worse than, at the same time.

Jeff Walker, writing in Personal Computer World, said of the the situation following the launch of the A600 that:

"The Amiga, if not quite dead, was dying fast. Had Commodore shot itself in the foot? How did Commodore find its foot? Did Commodore know that it had a foot?"

By 1993, Commodore appeared to have stopped print advertising, at least in the mainstream trade press like Personal Computer World.

Instead, it seemed to be concentrating on TV advertising, although even here it was limited to a single advert broadcast around Christmas.

However, it continued to launch new machines, sometimes to the suprise of the press.

When the top-of-the-range A4000 - based on the Motorola 68040 and retailing for £2,000, or about £5,360 in 2025 - was launched in 1992, Personal Computer World said of it that:

"This new Amiga was so different from the other new one, the A600, that there could be serious compatibility problems. What on earth was Commodore playing at?"

The A4000 was followed up with another suprise - the A1200, which was said to have arrived "like a bolt from the blue". The analysis of Commodore's new marketing strategy continued in a review of the A1200 in January 1993's Personal Computer World, with Jeff Walker saying:

"While a cheaper, cut-down version of the A4000 was being taken for granted, nobody expected another new Amiga featuring the 4000's Advanced Graphics Architecture chipset to look similar to the old Amiga 500 and sell for under £400".

With a nod to the past, referring to how the A500 had started slowly - selling only 12,000 units in the first year but eventually going on to sell over one million in the UK alone - the review of the A1200 concluded:

"The [Advanced Graphics Architecture] chipset and 32-bit architecture alone have breathed new life into the range. It can only get better, faster and cheaper from hereon in. Commodore is confident that this is the machine that will keep it going through the rest of the decade. High hopes, you might think, but after you've used the A1200 and some decent software for a while, you kinda get the feeling that history might be repeating itself^[3]".

In total, there were some 15 models of Amiga, including the CD32 and even a couple of versions that survived longer than Commodore itself^[4].

The Amiga 1500 retailed for £999, or about £2,840 in 2025.