> because it means no one outside of hardcore enthusiasts will buy one
I can imagine a version based on an emulation using a small ARM with the same physical keyboard and box, minus (or maybe not) floppy. The board is costly, and they expect to sell a finite number of units, so they need to recover the cost of the plastic injection tooling within that batch.
Having future versions based on emulated hardware would open up a market and drive down unit costs to more THEC64 Maxi levels, which would be extremely beneficial.
I'm looking forward to more retro machines, even if based on emulators, but with accurate physical reproductions of vintage hardware.
For lots of platforms, the physical object is not that important - We have 102/104-key with layouts that replicate most post PC-AT Unix workstations - it's the same layout we use, that the Archimedes and its descendants used, that most SGI's, most HP's and most other post-AT computers used. For those, the most important physical aspects are easy to replicate. If you really want, even a Trinitron tube can be replicated with a flexible OLED display and some bent plastic.
For computers like the C-64, 128, 65, Amigas, 8-bit Ataris, ST's, Apple II's, ///s, and earlier Macs, Sun workstations, Lisp machines, Alto's, Lilith's, DECs and others, the illusion will break if you use a PC keyboard and mouse. It'll feel strange.
