Here is my take on the failure of the Amiga in North America:

When I was in highschool, my friends and I had a motley collection of hardware, but we all had PCs, so it was easy for us to share programs with each other. Only one of my friends had an Amiga, and while I would say his out of the box experience was much better, it wasn't an easy machine to upgrade (compared to the extensive PC organ bank where you could go to a brick and mortar store, computer trade show, or Computer Shopper and find something for your PC). He also had to buy nearly everything out of magazines, as our local software store had a tiny Amiga section (about what the PC section has turned to today, amidst a sea of PS3 and Xbox games, heh).

The fact that you could start out with a mid-range 286 (or even XT) as a freshman in highschool with about $500-$700 in parts (some used, some not) and that you could upgrade to a 486 later down the road was a pretty big deal. Until 3d came around, if you researched stuff and bought carefully, you could really stretch out your investment. When huge changes came like PCI, 3d graphics, etc it was harder to migrate older hardware. I remember migrating an old 30MB MFM drive to a system with a low-end 486 until I could afford a bigger HD, and then using stacker on it to wring out just a bit more room. And back when it was hard to spend less than $300 on an HD for something around 120MB.

So, lack of software (warez or legit) combined with difficulty upgrading (and less of a used parts market, at least in the US) along with (more importantly) Commodore's ineptitude contributed to its demise.

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Here is my take on the failure of the Amiga in North America: […]
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Here is my take on the failure of the Amiga in North America:

When I was in highschool, my friends and I had a motley collection of hardware, but we all had PCs, so it was easy for us to share programs with each other. Only one of my friends had an Amiga, and while I would say his out of the box experience was much better, it wasn't an easy machine to upgrade (compared to the extensive PC organ bank where you could go to a brick and mortar store, computer trade show, or Computer Shopper and find something for your PC). He also had to buy nearly everything out of magazines, as our local software store had a tiny Amiga section (about what the PC section has turned to today, amidst a sea of PS3 and Xbox games, heh).

The fact that you could start out with a mid-range 286 (or even XT) as a freshman in highschool with about $500-$700 in parts (some used, some not) and that you could upgrade to a 486 later down the road was a pretty big deal. Until 3d came around, if you researched stuff and bought carefully, you could really stretch out your investment. When huge changes came like PCI, 3d graphics, etc it was harder to migrate older hardware. I remember migrating an old 30MB MFM drive to a system with a low-end 486 until I could afford a bigger HD, and then using stacker on it to wring out just a bit more room. And back when it was hard to spend less than $300 on an HD for something around 120MB.

So, lack of software (warez or legit) combined with difficulty upgrading (and less of a used parts market, at least in the US) along with (more importantly) Commodore's ineptitude contributed to its demise.

Since that's the case, do you think the Amiga would have been a bit more popular here if it were more expandable, and if Commodore had marketed it better?

Well, I wouldn't say that's the gospel truth, just my take on things based on my experience at the time.
You can make the argument that people value the ability to upgrade, even if they never do it. People like to have options, or at least the illusion of options.

You can also make the argument that warez/pirate software is another thing that helped kill the Amiga. The warez scene always seemed to be bigger in Europe than the US (to me, anyway, but I was never big into the BBS scene due to long distance rates so my perspective there could be limited). Why develop software for a machine that will get pirated?

I think that the following things, in decreasing order of importance, all contributed to the Amiga's demise overall and North America in particular:

1. Commodore itself
2. piracy
3. perception as a game machine only (it's not for serious business stuff if it has multimedia and pretty colors, as someone else mentioned)
4. limited expandability (for the more affordable models consumers were most likely to buy (A500, A1200, etc)

I do think that if Commodore had had even the slightest clue as to marketing, or if they had continued to innovate or modernize their system, that the Amiga would still exist (in some form anyway). I had contemplated on making a switch, at one point, but would have had to throw out the investment in software I already had, and by the time you had the 386/486, VGA and Soundblaster, the PC was pretty competitive (hardware wise, anyway)

For comparison, look at what happened with Apple. They went from being on the ropes in 1997 to being one of the most valuable companies in the world today. But they had something Commodore didn't have: talented leadership (in the form of Jobs).

As awful as it is, you cannot underestimate marketing in the success of a product. If you have a great product but don't have a clue how to tell people they need it or what they can do with it, you'll fail.

Here in Germany, the beginning of the demise of the Amiga pretty much coincided with the release of the 486DX2-66 clones with VESA Local Bus graphics cards (VLB being the direct predecessor of PCI) around 1992. From that point on, typical users (i.e. mostly gamers when talking about the Amiga, notwithstanding Amiga's potential in other, albeit much smaller, application markets) with a <1500 Deutschmark budget (i.e. < $1000 then) found the best bang for their buck in terms of gaming power in PC clones. Game developers seemed to realize the same, and from then on games simply looked better on the PC platform. No conspiracy there.

Having written graphics apps on one of the first Amiga 1000s in Germany around 1985, I was and still am a huge fan of the clean Amiga platform architecture with, at the time, close to optimal combination of standard and custom chips to do its job.

In my estimate, Commodore had time from 1987, when sales for the A500 really took off here, till 1992 to bring the Amiga architecture up to speed (literally) in order to compete with the rise of ever more powerful PC clones. Somehow 5 years were not enough for them to put up the necessary R&D funds (and brains?) before cheaper, more powerful competition, although with inferior architecture, flooded the market.

Why all the research, development and marketing money went into the IBM/ Intel/ Microsoft architecture is a different question altogether.

Much earlier for me...

386DX with VGA and Sound Blaster was when things tipped in favour of the PC. Games would come on ~ 10 floppy disks.

Growing up most people had C64s, 500s and 1040STs. PCs were usually 8086/8s. Only very few people had 286s/386s. I remember kids ringing the door bell to play VGA games on my 286 with my SB in 91/92/93. I also remember seeing a 486 @ a friend in 1992 / 1993: wow! 😊

I grew up in the NL.