How many Amigas Commodore sold

Last Updated on May 1, 2025 by Dave Farquhar

The number of Amigas Commodore sold has always been controversial. There is no question it was less successful than the Commodore 64, no question it was less successful than the PC clone ecosystem, and every possibility it sold fewer units than IBM sold on its own. But the number Commodore sold has always been a mystery, and it turns out I’ve been telling people the wrong number.

The generally accepted number of Commodore 64s sold is incorrect. It is possible to arrive at an accurate number by using Commodore’s annual reports. There is one year that is missing data, but the average of the two adjacent years won’t be far off from how many units actually sold in the missing year. When you do that, the results come to about 12 million units.

Some of the widely quoted Amiga sales figures are close, but it’s a coincidence they were that close. The commonly accepted number of 4.85 million is close, but there was rounding involved in that total. Another higher number you may sometimes hear, 5,282,200, was the number of Commodore computers sold in Germany, excluding PC compatibles, but including the 8-bit computers. That number came from Dr. Peter Kittel, but misquotes him.

This YouTube video uses the 1992 Commodore annual shareholders report as a starting point, and then uses internal Commodore documents shared by former Commodore employees after Commodore went out of business to fill in some of the remaining gaps.

The total number of Amigas Commodore sold

The number they arrive at in the video linked above is 4.91 million. I always thought the number was closer to 3 million, but there it is, right there in Commodore’s 1992 annual report, that they had reached 3.7 million units sold. That makes me both happy and sad. I’m glad more people bought the machines than I previously thought, but it makes me sad for what might have been. It means they managed to sell 1.2 million machines on their deathbed.

How many Amigas Commodore sold year by year

Using their numbers to estimate the number of machines sold per year gives some additional insights into the platform’s life.

1986: 92,000
1987: 184,000
1988: 420,000
1989: 500,000
1990: 629,000
1991: 865,000
1992: 1,010,000 (brought total to 3.7m)
1993: 785,000
1994: 370,000 (estimated. 281,000 known from first half. Estimate for full year is 370,000)
1995: 54,000 (source: Petro Tyschtschenko, Director of Amiga Technologies, Escom)

These figures are for fiscal years, not calendar years. Commodore’s fiscal year ran from July to June. The Amiga 1000 was introduced in calendar year 1985, but it was already fiscal year 1986 for Commodore. As you can see from the 1986 and 1987 sales figures, the Amiga 1000 didn’t sell very well. Sales started to increase in fiscal year 1988, the first full fiscal year that the Amiga 500 and 2000 were in play. The 500 was the best selling Amiga of all time.

The 1995 figures are after Commodore went out of business. Its new owner, Escom, wasn’t able to build very many units before going out of business itself. Tyschtschenko said Escom built and sold 50,000 Amiga 1200s and 4,000 Amiga 4000s.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for Amiga sales

It’s important to note sales were still increasing at the time of the 1992 annual report. The following year, the platform received a significant boost from the new AGA architecture that kept sales trending upward. But it could have been better than that. With AGA, Commodore was still getting used to using contract manufacturers, rather than making the chips themselves. They weren’t used to the longer lead times the contract manufacturers needed, so they didn’t get the orders in on time. They couldn’t make enough Amiga 1200s to meet demand for Christmas, so they ended up building a bunch of Amiga 600s instead.

If it hadn’t been for that mishap, they would have been selling Amiga 1200s at full price throughout fiscal 1993 instead of selling Amiga 600s at closeout prices later on. And they very likely could have sold more than a million Amigas a second year in a row.

These sales figures explain why I was feeling optimistic about the Amiga even in 1992. It’s easy to look back now and say you could see signs of Commodore’s demise all the way back in 1979 or whenever. In 1992, the aging Amigas were selling well with help on the way. Then help arrived in the form of the new AGA-based Amigas, and Commodore couldn’t keep up with demand. That’s exactly the problem you want to have. Then the wheels came off due to cashflow problems.

Challenging the popular narrative on the Amiga’s trajectory

The trend challenges the popular narrative that the Amiga started out well, but couldn’t keep up with 386 based PCs with VGA and a Sound Blaster. That’s a fair enough statement in the United States. But it is not true worldwide. If that had been a worldwide trend, sales wouldn’t have continued to increase.

Commodore was going to need to modernize their chipset again, after 1992’s AGA chipset, but that plan was already in the works. They also needed to figure out what they were going to do for a CPU. Apple moved away from the Motorola 68k line after the 68040 processor. Motorola had a 68060 processor, and third parties already had that CPU working on existing Amigas. Presumably, Commodore would have stayed one more generation before moving to one of the available RISC architectures.

The problem wasn’t the platform ran out of time. The problem was the company making it ran out of time. Failing to execute in the 1992 Christmas season meant they didn’t have cash flow they needed to get through calendar year 1993. Christmas 1993 was an even bigger disaster than Christmas 1992. That year it wasn’t even a matter of making the wrong thing. They made what they could, all of it sold, but they didn’t have the cash flow to make enough that quarter to remain viable.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.