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.

In total, there were some 15 models of Amiga, including the CD32 and even a couple of versions that survived longer than Commodore itself^[3].

The Amiga 1500 retailed for £999, or about £2,730 in 2024.