Well, we had a resounding success with our latest reader survey, and I'm glad to see that most Amiga owners are actually intelligent enough to work out where to send their entries even though we purposefully didn't include an address to send them to, honest...Actually, we always knew that you lot were brighter than the average Amiga user, and probably a bit more mature, and the results we have collated bear this out. There are very few of the old unexpanded Amiga fraternity content to spend their hard-earned merely on games and a joystick every year, and most of you seem to be quite prepared to lavish a fairly large amount of money on your machines over the course of the next year.
So let's have those results then shall we? It came as no surprise that the machine that was most popular was the A1200, closely followed by the A2000/A1500. In fact, quite a lot of you seem eager to actually own more than one machine, which would obviously mean that a network port as standard on an Amiga would prove to be a popular decision on AT's part. Even more pleasant to relate is the fact that over 91% of our readers have a hard drive (surprisingly the average size was a massive 585MB), with only a recalcitrant or poor 8.1% having to suffer the ignominies of the floppy drive.
The fact that most of you are using A1200s is borne out by the processor stats showing the vast majority of people using an 020. Funnily enough though, the figure for 020 usage is actually only just bigger than that for 030, meaning you all must like upgrading your 1200s, a fact which is also shown by the statistic that says that nearly half of you own an FPU of one desription or another. Because you all seem to have accelerator cards Fast RAM is also very high with an average amongst Amiga Computing readers of over 7.5MB.
The number of CD-ROM drives out there is also surprisingly high, especially when you consider the dearth of really good CD-based software, but very nearly half of our readers actually have a CD drive. Maybe you all use them for playing music most of the time, like I do?
Comms was an area surprisingly undersubscribed to, especially considering how busy the Aminet is, but it shows that we are actually providing you with a service when we put Aminet releases on our coverdisks. In the end, only just over a third of you have a modem, just over half that number have a 14.4k modem and just over half that number also have an Internet connection.
Perhaps because of the preponderance of A1200 owners, there are very few of you who have graphics cards, although quite a few stated that their favourite piece of hardware would be one of these high resolution output devices. This probably accounts for the fact that most of you who have a monitor still only have a 1084-type monitor, althoughthe low end and high end multiscan figures put together nearly match the 1084-type.
Disappointingly, most of you still only have a dot-matrix printer, although the inkjet/bubblejet camp is in close second place. Only about eight per cent of you don't have a printer at all, so let's keep those letters comig in please!
That A1200 bias pops its head up again in the Workbench revision answers, with the overwhelming majority of you using Workbench 3.0. 3.1 accounts for the next highest figure and thankfully 1.3 only now accounts for 5% of our readership. Even so, this is far too many people. Get your acts together and upgrade!
As far as software is concerned, it seems that very few of you actually use your Amigas for CAD, but that a huge proportion of you actually do spreadsheets on your machines. Games are as popular as ever with only a small amount of you denying you ever play them. The Amiga's supposed strengths are not being used to the full by our readers either, with a poor showing for video titling, editing, multimedia and animation, although an increasing number of you are using Amigas for 3D graphics. Unsuprisingly enough, not one of you never uses a word processor, so it looks like Softwood and Digita are right to keep up their arms race.
Onto the magazine now and it seems that most of you think we are doing a good job overall, although a lot of you say you would like more ESP and ACAS pages. To be honest, we wouldn't mind filling the entire magazine with problems and letters, it would certainly make our job easier, but we can't do it. Why not? Because of the fact that you lot have to actually write the letters and problems before we can put them in the magazine. We don't have a policy of making up letters to fit the number of pages we have set aside for them, so it is your input we rely on.
Overall you seem to like the magazine though with only the Amigaguide section getting a higher than average 'poor' response. Then again, it also gets a larger 'excellent' response than most other sections so I'm not sure what we can learn from this, however, we will be putting our heads together to see if we can revamp the section in some way. The most encouraging aspect for us is the fact that most of you think our reviews and features - the core of our magazine - are either good or excellent.
One of the set of statistics we found rather confusing to start with was the fact that so many of you find the magazine easily, until we realised we should have worded the questionnaire slightly differently to take account of subscribers saying 'Yes, it's on my doormat every month'. What we actually meant to ask was whether those of you that don't subscribe found it easily in your local newsagent, but never mind.
Of those subscribers we have, the majority of you have only subscribed for between one and two years, which can only be put down to our new American and Canadian readers from the demise of Amiga World, but we do have a hardcore of readers who have been with us for over five years.
The last section of our survey dealt with the sticky biological questions of what sex you were and how old. I think it's a shame that we have so few female readers, or at least ones who were willing to send in their questionnaires, with only 2.6 per cent of respondants wearing frocks (to our knowledge). Our readers tend to be more mature than the demographics would appear to show for other magazines, with a large number of respondants putting 'retired' in as their occupation, but the largest section of you are aged between 36 and 50.
We've picked a winner from the huge selection of entries we had. He's a sixth year student in Tilehurst near Reading and he has three Amigas, an A500 an A500+ and an A2000 and he likes DTP, 3D graphics and a lot more. He's one of our 50% that don't have a CD-ROM drive yet and he doesn't have a modem. So if would like to get in contact with us, we'll see what we can do to give him a copy of his most wanted package - Cinema4D.
So, thanks very much for providing us with the information we need to continue to make Amiga Computing the best magazine on the shelf and you can look forward to seeing changes based on your desires in the near future.
© 1996 IDG Media