It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0 The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard) Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that. The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting. Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.