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Except it was outsold by the Commodore 64 (5-6 million Apple 2's sold, 17 million C64s + 5 million C128s). Even Vic-20 sold close to 1 million. The Commodore PET sold 4000 units in 1978. The Sinclair Spectrum ZX sold about 5 million units.

Given Apple's revenue of $7.9 million in 1978, and a base price of $1300, Apple sold about 6000 Apple 2s in 1978. So I guess on that basis, Apple II > Commodore PET, but the history of 8-bit home computers was written by Commodore. Everyone else is a footnote.

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> Except it was outsold by the Commodore 64

I don't see how that is an exception to anything in the ad. It's from 1978, still four years before Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The claim is that it is the best selling computer, in 1978, not that it always will be.

Don't get me wrong, it's interesting information. The phrasing of it as an exception to the claims of the ad is strange and confusing.

Growing up in Norway I never saw an Apple II in person. Apple didn't get a presence until the Mac, which for the first few years stood largely ignored in a corner of my local computer store.

It emphasises how much peoples views of these brands were shaped by geographical differences. Commodore totally dominated in large parts of Europe, where Apple was a weird curiosity, behind Commodore, Spectrum, Amstrad. Even machines like Oric and Apricot had more of a presence. Atari was also rare until the ST. Eventually even Acorn Archimedes became more common to see in my circles than Apple. Briefly.

Elsewhere in Europe the list of machines was different, but from what I remember Apple struggled to get a foothold most places until the Mac. Largely I suspect because it was so expensive compared to most of the above.

It was first in the mid-90s Apple became something I came across regularly.

During the 80s, I often traded software with Europeans in the C64 and Amiga scenes. I'd send them US software, and they'd send me European software. Most Americans had C64, 1541 drives, 2400 baud modems, etc. The Europeans typically had datasettes and 300-1200 baud modems, because the cost of equipment was higher, phone calls were more expensive, and there was even a modem tax in Germany apparently.

So the protocol we used was that Americans would send them a 2400 baud modem, and make international calls to them, in exchange for hot new European game releases, because the extra speed would reduce the expense.

There's simply no way Europeans were going to buy overpriced, underpowered Apple hardware at that point in time. There was nothing an Apple 2 could do that a C64 couldn't, and a C64 could do substantially more than an Apple 2.

The results of the demoscene, which still exists for C64s, Amigas, Atari STs, and Spectrums, but is almost non-existent for the Apple 2, shows how under capable and uninteresting the platform was.

> So the protocol we used was that Americans would send them a 2400 baud modem, and make international calls to them, in exchange for hot new European game releases, because the extra speed would reduce the expense.

I never was that involved in trading. My circle stuck to mailing floppies, mostly within Norway. It was fun seeing how that too became optimised for quick turnaround - sometimes mailed without an envelope, just the protective cover taped in place... And with a lot of the more prolific traders eventually getting caught using wax over the stamps to allow them to scrape off the post mark and reuse the stamp to save money.

But, yeah, especially the lack of unmetered local calls in Europe was a massive limiting factor on modems, and coupled with no single standard for type approval of telecoms equipment which drove up the modem cost massively, especially in the smaller markets, it was a massive luxury until early 90's at least. I didn't get one until '93.

> It was fun seeing how that too became optimised for quick turnaround - sometimes mailed without an envelope, just the protective cover taped in place... And with a lot of the more prolific traders eventually getting caught using wax over the stamps to allow them to scrape off the post mark and reuse the stamp to save money.

Same in Australia. My friend had feds staking out his place for reusing stamps :/

The C64 has no equivalent to the Apple II system monitor, which allows you to examine, change, and disassemble memory interactively, and includes a mini-assembler as well. It provides a very natural pathway to understanding the inner workings of the computer.

The C64 also has no equivalent to the seven expansion slots of the Apple II, which allow you to customize your computer (by installing a CP/M card to run Wordstar and dBase II, for instance, or by adding bank-switched RAM) and to easily develop your own hardware.

The graphics and sound capabilities of the C64 are superior to those of the stock Apple II, and I think that explains why demos are still popular on it.

> The C64 has no equivalent to the Apple II system monitor, which allows you to examine, change, and disassemble memory interactively, and includes a mini-assembler as well. It provides a very natural pathway to understanding the inner workings of the computer.

Supermon has been around since the PET days. I had no problem exploring my C64, I just had to load it from disk.

However, did Apple 2 have anything like an Action Replay cartridge. Not only does it provide normal machine language monitor capabilities, but it does it through an NMI (non-maskable interrupt) that takes over the entire system, freezes it, and allows you to inspect all aspects of the hardware, including write only latches. It includes sprite editor, font inspector, and can even 'core dump' the entire C64 into a suspended state that you can load and resume.

This was used to "crack" copy protection much of the time by just dumping a freezed copy of the game after it had fully loaded.

> seven expansion slots of the Apple II

The C64 had both a User slot and a cartridge slot, in addition to RSS-488 serial bus which allowed daisy chaining like Firewire. So for example, you could plug 2 joysticks into the joy ports, a Ram Expansion Unit (REU 128k or 512k) into the cartridge port for GEOS or your BBS, and a RS-232 UART into the User port to get 9600 baud modems working.

My C64 had a 9600bps modem with UART in the User port, an Action Reply in the cartridge port, two printers, two disk drives. I never needed many "slots". The Apple II did not have the ability to talk to a printer or external disk drives without an interface card.

The point is that the system monitor is in ROM, always accessible, and easy for a beginner to discover and experiment with. It feels part of the system in a way a disk-loaded monitor does not.

Yes, the Apple II had several so-called "copy cards" that allowed you to interrupt a running program, explore memory, dump it to disk, etc. Very useful for debugging, and as you say, automatically cracking single-load programs. My Apple //e had a Senior PROM installed, which provides similar features without taking up a slot.

I don't think you can compare the hardware accessories for the C64 with the wide variety of expansion cards available for the Apple II. You could really customize your hardware. My Apple //e had the above-mentioned Senior PROM, a CP/M card for running Turbo Pascal, a 4 MHz accelerator, 9-voice music card, an EPROM burner, and a "Quikloader" card that allowed me to put my most-used programs on EPROMs and have them instantly available at a moment's notice. Not quite like having a hard drive, but close. Later, I removed the CP/M card and music card I didn't use anymore and added 1 megabyte of battery-backed RAM.

> The Apple II did not have the ability to talk to a printer or external disk drives without an interface card.

And that means you could connect it to your choice of a parallel or serial printer (just get the appropriate kind of card), or go with third-party disk drives that had 2x or 4x the capacity. That's a good thing.

Man, I feel like I'm 16 again, arguing with my Commodore-owning friends about who has the better computer. Thanks, this is fun.

The Apple II was hardwired to run on 60Hz AC and used a limited character set. Minimal hardware design has its downsides. In countries that run 50Hz AC games and other real-time software ran slower or had wrong timing. I noticed quite a number of Apple IIs in Germany being used in engineering or with measurement equipment because of the expansion slots. But software had to be modified to cope for the 50Hz.

Wait, why would the AC frequency affect the CPU clock? Did it use a multiplier instead of an internal clock?

Update: it sounds[1] like other AC circuits might have been affected, perhaps the motors in the disk drive.

[1] "On the hardware side, there were timing differences on the ITT 2020 motherboard, due to the 50 Hz frequency used with the 220 VAC power standards in the UK and Europe." https://apple2history.org/history/ah12/#01

I don't think AC is related to a different clock, but the II's system timings are tied to video generation and PAL did 50 fields per second, so maybe that's an issue.

The C64 designed for European markets was slightly slower than its American counterpart.

yeah, growing up in denmark in the 80ties all I saw was commodore 64, amigas and msdos machines.

Here are the numbers that Jeremy Reimer has for thousands of units sold in 1978[0]:

     TRS-80:       150
     Commodore Pet: 30
     Apple II:       7.6
     Altair:         4
     Others:       100

It lists a total of 258 thousand, which seems to omit Apples and Altairs. His 2005 article[1] talked about 4000 Pets sold in 1978 (the number you gave as well), which is an order of magnitude less.

[0] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=137 [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/3/

The Commodore and Soectrum were definitely hobbyist home computers, the Apple ][ was something rather different. The Commodore PET was its peer

For us, the Spectrum was everything the Apple ][ was to you. But the BBC Micro used a lot in education is probably what you should really be comparing the Apple ][ to. It was better than the Apple ][ in many ways. It had most of the features, but it had some really innovative stuff. Not least the Tube - that allowed a co processor - but could be anything. The BBC Micro was 6502, but the Tube allowed Z80 so you could run CPM. It was also the tool that Acorn apparently used developed the ARM processor prototypes.

The main issue with the Apple ][ was that it stayed more or less the same for its entire life, and the way is was got dated. The difference between the PET and the C64 is that the design evolved (but the basic fabric was pretty similar.) I know there was the Apple 2 GS later, but that was a lot later and probably a little too late.

IMO the European computer scene was very different from the US, and in many ways more advanced. Because there was constant innovation and competition. That drove things forward, and affected the US computer manufacturers indirectly as they wanted to sell in to this market. So we had all the US computers (Commodore, RadioShack, Atari, TI etc), but also (at least in the UK) Sinclair ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum (TS1000 and most other Timex machines were based on this range), Tangerine Oric 1/Atmos, Amstrad CPC/PCW/NC, Camputers Lynx, Dragon 32/64, Enterprise 64/128, Grundy Newbrain, Jupiter ACE, Memotech MTX range, Acorn Atom/BBC/Electron/Archimedes (latter, for which they invented and used the ARM processor). Our 80's 8bit journey was rich and varied.

> I know there was the Apple 2 GS later, but that was a lot later and probably a little too late.

The IIgs is a weird thing. It's a new computer with an Apple IIe built-in, a bit like the C-128, which was essentially a C-64 with two other computers built-in. In many aspects, the Apple /// was more of an Apple II than the IIgs.

The gs was also limited in performance so it wouldn't cannibalize Mac sales. A slightly faster 65816 would run rings around the 68000 in the Mac.

In the late 80's, the IIgs was often grouped with the Amiga and Atari ST. You'd often see games (like Marble Madness, Zany Golf...) available for all three. The game situation on early Macs was not good.

I wanted a IIgs for a while, but a BBSer convinced me the Amiga was a better choice.

> For us, the Spectrum was everything the Apple ][ was to you

I really doubt that. I had a Spectrum at home with the microdrives and the Sinclair printer (silver paper, remmber that?). I used Apple 2s at school and taught with them at summer camp. I loved both machines and learned both 6502 and Z80 machine code thans to them. We also had the gorgeous BBC Micros with the Tube coprocessor and disk drives.

The Spectrum was never going to be a business PC - just the keyboard tells you that. Not even the rather nice QL had a poper business keyboard.

But the Speccy was to us in the UK, what the Apple][ was in the US. The funny weird home grown computer that everyone still seems to love despite it being old, quirky and obsolete.

The +2, +2A/B and +3 has much more standard keyboards.

The BBC dominated Schools in the part of the UK I lived in. I never saw an Apple ][ - I think the only one I ever saw in real life was in a museum.

You realize of course, that the Commodore 64/128 were better than the Apple 2 and PET in every conceivable way? RAM, graphics, sound, available software library, etc. It wasn't until the IIc/e where it had something that a C64 didn't, 80 column mode (C128 had it)

The Apple IIc cost as much as an Amiga 1000, a machine which was a quantum leap better, than both the Apple 2 series, and greatly superior in HW to the Mac until the introduction of the Mac II's introduction (for $12,000 in 2019 dollars)

> You realize of course, that the Commodore 64/128 were better than the Apple 2 and PET in every conceivable way?

"Of course" is indeed is the right phrase to use here. The Commodore 2 is a computer from several years later, at time when Moore's law was in full swing. Put another way, my laptop or smartphone is better than an Apple 2 and was cheaper to buy... Yes, but so what? I don't see what point you're making (in either this comment or the GP one), except that hardware gets better over time.

The C64 wasn't better than the Apple 2 because of Moore's law. The C64 and Apple 2 both had 6502s running around 1Mhz. The C64 was better than the Apple 2, because of superior overall design of the HW. The VIC-II, SID, and CIA chips.

The overall point I'm making is that for years Apple sold inferior hardware at vastly inflated prices, and made up for it only in superior marketing. Commodore had a whole team of Steve Wozniaks doing wonders, and managed to sell a ton of great, functional computers for people, but go unrecognized because of incompetent management that ultimately doomed the company.

HN is flooded continuously with Apple hagiography, but in the 80s, practically no one I knew owned an Apple, whether it was regular kids down the streets, or the hackers and phreakers, crackers, and demo scene folks I frequented with online. But somehow, an entire decade where Commodore computers were ubiquitous and dominated non-business environments, is unknown to today's millennials.

>...superior overall design of the HW. The VIC-II, SID, and CIA chips.

Chips that didn't exist in 1978. The overall point you're making is that technology from several years later was better.

Or you're trying to hijack the thread into a rant about Apple in the 1980s and later for some reason.

> Chips that didn't exist in 1978. The overall point you're making is that technology from several years later was better.

Not relevant. Years later, even the Apple IIc (1984) wasn't close to a C64, not to mention an Amiga.

The thing you're missing is, Commodore had purchased MOS Technology, just like Apple purchased PA Semi to make their own iPhone SoCs, and had spent years investing in custom silicon going back to the VIC in 1979. The Apple II did not have a "video chip". Wozniak had cobbled together a video chip out of a bunch of 74LS TTL chips. Here, learn to built one yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rce6IQDWs

That's what I meant by "superior design". Commodore actually had integrated CMOS chips for video, audio, I/O, that they had designed in house and fabbed themselves. The Apple 2, well into the IIc days, was built like a semi-decent Arduino project. Even the Mac had gfx and DMA cobbled out of TTL chips.

I think maybe you have some interesting information that's buried in a very confusing presentation - at least that's my best guess of what's going on.

If you'd started your original comment with something like "Just a few years later, in 1984, Apple's new offering the IIc was barely any better than the original while C64 had a far superior (...) but Apples continued to sell better because of shallow marketing" it would've made it clear you were switching to a related but different subject. As it was, you seemed to just directly compare the original Apple against something much later. You don't seem to get why people keep making seemingly unrelated comments - it's because we're still applying your comments to the original Apple II, but you're actually not talking about that any more.

>Not relevant.

OK, explain to me how technology released in 1982 and 1984, and the sales of products not yet released, are relevant to statements about the then current state of affairs in 1978? You know, the topic of this whole thread. Maybe that's what I'm not understanding. Please enlighten me.

And yet there's a reason why Woz is known to this day as a brilliant engineer. He basically did the impossible, designing color graphics and disk controllers without custom hardware. Obviously the design of a computer is much easier given custom chips.

I love Woz, but he did so, because of what he was given. Apple was raking in tens of millions from the Apple 2, why didn't they give Woz a team of chip designers for the follow on products? I mean, the Mac was launched similarly with TTL based logic "GPU", compared with the Commodore Amiga 1 year later which launched with 3 custom ASICs just like the C64.

And by better, I mean, this was the kind of stuff 1982 C64 hardware could do (see whole demo for more, but here's real-time 16fps video decoding + digital sound): https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=715

And here's what 1985 Amiga HW could do. This isn't Moore's law advantage (compare to 1984 and 85 Mac models).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs

Fun personal note: I grew up about two miles from MOS Technology's HQ!

   The overall point I'm making is that for years Apple 
   sold inferior hardware at vastly inflated prices, and 
   made up for it only in superior marketing

This is a simplistic take that ignores some key actual reasons. There's no argument that the C64 was superior in terms of graphics and sound although even that comes with a caveat.

Marketing is not why Apple beat Commodore, or at least far from the only reason. Nobody bought Apples because of the ads. I don't remember even seeing an Apple ad on TV, and people weren't so impressed by magazine ads that they would go spend an extra $1,000 on Apple.

---

1. The Apple II's were much more expandable thanks to their expansion slots, and there was a big ecosystem in place here already by the time the C64 gathered steam. You can see a somewhat similar dynamic at work today with RaspberryPi. There are competitors with more powerful hardware but with RaspberryPi, the ecosystem is the draw.

2. The Apple II (and soon after, the Mac) dominated the US education market. They developed strong relationships with schools, and had the most "educational" software titles.

3. 80-column mode. I know there were ways to achieve it on a C64, but what percentage of titles supported it? Additionally, a lot of folks had their C64s hooked up to crappy TVs that couldn't display it.

4. The C64's superior graphics and sound ability hurt it in the minds of many consumers. It was cheaper than an Apple II, but as far as parents were concerned that was still a lot of money to pay for a "game machine." Whereas the even more expensive Apple II, with a better selection of educational and "serious" software, was seen more as an investment in a child's future.

---

I can tell you that in our household, #2 and #4 were why my (non tech savvy) parents bought us an Apple. They wanted me to have "what schools used."

Did they make the right choice? Well, the Apple IIgs we got was definitely underwhelming. Obviously a C128 or Amiga would have been better for gaming and writing fun stuff. But, our local school district did use Apples back then. So it was kind of an advantage for me, to have one at home.

>The C64's superior graphics and sound ability hurt it in the minds of many consumers. It was cheaper than an Apple II, but as far as parents were concerned that was still a lot of money to pay for a "game machine." Whereas the even more expensive Apple II, with a better selection of educational and "serious" software, was seen more as an investment in a child's future.

Then why did the C64 sell 22 million units and the Apple 2 only sold 5-6 million if consumers had a bad impression of it.

> Obviously a C128 or Amiga would have been better for gaming and writing fun stuff.

And pretty much everything else. Seriously, in college, everyone in engineering used TeX. I used TeX on my Amiga. It produced superior output for math and engineering papers compared to the best you could achieve on a Mac with WYSIWYG.

Sorry, but best estimates of actual Commodore 64 sales are roughly 12.5 million, not 22 million. Still, there's no doubt that they handily outsold Apple II's.

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547 (includes some neat serial number analysis)

    Then why did the C64 sell 22 million units and 
    the Apple 2 only sold 5-6 million if consumers 
    had a bad impression of it.

This is bad-faith arguing on your part; it's beneath HN. I clearly didn't say they had a "bad" impression of it. I typed something a lot more nuanced about the different impression folks had regarding the two machines. Feel free to agree or disagree with the points I actually made, but there's no need to make up words and put them into my mouth.

I said it was viewed as a less serious computer; more of a games machine.

I can think of a few reasons for this, in addition to the ones I've named, such as being sold in literal toy stores. Do you think perhaps that influenced peoples' perceptions?

    And pretty much everything else. Seriously, in college, 
    everyone in engineering used TeX. I used TeX on my Amiga. 
    It produced superior output for math and engineering papers 
    compared to the best you could achieve on a Mac with WYSIWYG.

Yeah, no doubt. Again, and I'm not sure I can state this explicitly enough given your posting spree here, but I'm not disputing that the C64/128 and particularly the Amiga were better at so many things.

However, the initial simplistic assertion that "[Apple] made up for it only in superior marketing" (emphasis mine) ignores quite a few other factors.

> Sorry, but best estimates of actual Commodore 64 sales are roughly 12.5 million, not 22 million. Still, there's no doubt that they handily outsold Apple II's.

It leaves out the C128 sales, which is like leaving out the IIe/IIc.

> "[Apple] made up for it only in superior marketing" (emphasis mine) ignores quite a few other factors.

I wish I could agree, but from a HW perspective, Apple was doing a bad job. They had years and a ton of revenues from the Apple II, and failed to significantly innovate in HW. From a software perspective, they were much better than Commodore. Look, I had a Mac 128k in 1985 and an Amiga 1000, and although Mac OS and its DTP software was better in some respects than the Amiga, the HW was not, with the exception of LocalTalk/AppleTalk.

I also think you are ignoring why parents often bought computers for their kids in the 1980s -- because the kids asked for them. Because they could play games. It just so happened they could also be used for education tasks, but huge numbers of people were inspired to go into STEM because of playing games on early 8-bit computers, and then asking "How did they make this?"

For computers like the C64, lots of kids would type in game source code published in magazines like Compute! Gazette!, run the games, and when they got bored of them, they'd modify them. It was the early open-source model, learn by forking.

Most of my friends asked their parents for computers because of the sexy graphics and sound. They then serendipitously learned from them.

So whether the numbers are 12 million or 17 million or 22 million, I'm willing to bet there are far more engineers of my generation who cut their teeth on a C64, Atari, Spectrum ZX, or an Amstrad, because of the flashy graphics and games, then the children of parents who read splashy Apple full page ads talking about how 'educational' they were.

What's my point of of these rants? It seems unlike criticism of Commodore, people can't deal with any criticism of Apple Hagiography, that after shipping the first Apple 2 in 1978, they stagnated, and were never good at HW innovation. The lionization of the Apple 2 ignores the reality of the world of millions of Europeans who never saw one, effectively cementing an American viewpoint of 8-bit computing.

    It seems unlike criticism of Commodore, people can't 
    deal with any criticism of Apple Hagiography,

This is a misunderstanding of the folks interacting with you on this comment thread. Perhaps you grew up elsewhere and there is a language barrier. I'm not sure how else to explain it.

This thread is filled with folks freely pointing out areas in which Commodore's offerings were superior, that the Apple II line clearly stagnated for a decade before culminating in the intentionally crippled IIgs. I don't see people even remotely promoting "hagiorgraphy", just folks (besides you) attempting to have a nuanced discussion.

Not to mention my vested interest in Commodore/MOS since I grew up just a few miles from MOS' HQ and have even visited the building. So to suggest I am locked into a US/Apple-only view of personal computers in the 80s is absolutely absurd. Good day and good bye. I certainly hope the rest of your HN interactions are not like this.

Apple marketed directly to schools in the US. They were successful at this all the way through the mid 90s. Nobody I knew at the time used Apple computers at home, but every school had Apple computers in a lab and in the library.

> You realize of course, that the Commodore 64/128 were better than the Apple 2 and PET in every conceivable way?

Having been launched many years after the II and the PET, I'd expect much better specs. One key selling point of the II was the software library. The Commodores had great games, but Apple II's, aided by the Disk II, had orders of magnitude more, in both numbers and diversity. Up to the 128, disk performance also hurt the Commodore 64 family. The IIs architecture remained very stable over the years and backwards compatibility was always excellent. This allowed Apple to have very healthy profit margins (to the point of hurting itself) because it protected the investment in software.

Don't get me wrong - I love the 64 (love the 128 a bit less) and the brilliant idea of having a disk drive that has its own computer inside (same applies to the 8-bit Ataris).

Also, many people with other computers in the 1980s maybe don't realize how many of their games were ports of Apple II games. Lord British's "Ultima" series (at least up to Ultima 5) were developed on the Apple II and ported to the C64 and MS-DOS later. Same with Castle Wolfenstein. And the Wizardry series.

> You realize of course, that the Commodore 64/128 were better than the Apple 2 and PET in every conceivable way?

Disks were WAY faster on Apple II than C-64.

Also in the mid 80's when I was in elementary school, all my schools had Apple II's and all of them had 80 columns. I get the feeling it was better supported in software on Apple II than the options available for 80-column output on C64.

Both of these were more important to business use than the C-64's SID or VIC chips.

I think you're underestimating just how dominant the Apple II was in the late seventies to mid eighties, at least in the US.. Apple made the machine until 1993 (and the model I'm talking about isn't even the 16-bit IIgs, but the 8-bit IIe) because they were still selling profitably up until then. Every school had them and every parent who could afford one got one for their kids. Commodore 64s were cheaper, sure, but had a reputation as a game machine and couldn't run Apple software or even exchange files with Apples. Better to buy an Apple II clone if you couldn't afford a real one.

Not that there weren't games for the Apple II... there were plenty. Most of the biggest game publishers of the early micro era, including one or two that still exist today, developed for the Apple II first. Sierra On-Line, Broderbund, Electronic Arts. Programming an arcade game on the Apple II was so challenging, what with its bizarre screen memory layout, weird color scheme, and lack of hardware sprites, that many Apple II game programmers viewed programming for the C64 or Atari 400/800 (which used the same CPU but had actual graphics and sound hardware) as akin to cheating. Some of the most creative games of the era arose from these technical limitations. And hordes of young programmers cut their teeth learning how to remove the copy protection from these games so they could trade them for free games others had cracked. The guys who started id Software met at an Apple II publisher.

It was as dominant in business right up until the IBM PC took off and even for some time after, thanks to VisiCalc, the first killer app. When Apple released the integrated software package AppleWorks in 1984 it shot to the top of the sales charts. Not merely the Apple II charts, but the industry charts for all computers including the PC. It stayed there for months and served as a foundation of a healthy third-party development ecosystem for years.

The profits from the Apple II line paid for the development of the Lisa and then the Macintosh, and kept the company afloat until the Mac was profitable.

Yeah, the Apple II was a big deal. I got in a bit late myself (I stared my first job in the industry in 1990) but it was still the foundation of my technology career.

VIC-20 sold close to 3 million units. VIC-20 was the first computer to sell 1 million units.

Regardless, this article is 1978, before the VIC-20 or C64 came out.

The TRS-80 was, by far, the best selling of the 1977 Trinity. This was because it had the lowest price and it was readily available from Radio Shack stores. Commodore had trouble producing the PET and the inclusion of the monitor and tape drive made it have a higher price.

I'm curious where these numbers come from. Wikipedia says that by 1980 apples revenue was $118 million and that was before they released the most popular model (the IIe in jan of 1983), which was still being sold in 1993. The C64 by itself may have sold more units than anything apple produced, but you added up the entire 6502 commodore line. Adding up the entire II line might be an interesting comparison.

In the US as I remember the 1980's apple ][s were everywhere. And there were 6 models (or more depending on if you count the revisions), and a number of clones (Franklin Ace and laser 128, were two popular ones).

So, It would be interesting to get numbers for all those models, because each successive generation definitely cannibalized the previous ones. No one purchased the plus after the 'e' came out, and the gs was definitely the machine to own later in the life-cycle (particularly with an accelerator).

I couldn't find overall numbers with a quick google search.

Not sure, because the Apple II was easy to copy and it was very popular to buy a Pear computer without roms and just insert the copy of the EPROMs to have a full functional Apple II at a bargain price.

Commodore 64 units were so cheap they got sold in toy stores. This made computer shops angry at Commodore. So when the Commodore Amiga 1000 came out computer stores didn't want to carry it.

In the UK it was completely different. You didn't go to toy stores to buy computers, we had a number of Electronics retailers and department stores that sold them. They were in Dixon's, Curry's and Comet (all electrical retailers, the former two still exist in some type of form), but also places like Boots (mainly a chemist/pharmacy), WHSmith (mainly a book, stationary and newspaper retailer), Department stores like Debenhams. There were no "mom and pop" computer stores. They were usually all on display, and all very accessible. We had a massive programme to learn about computers in schools so we all knew how to write some basic, and kids would walk up to them and code little demos (some version of "10 print "this store stinks": goto 10" was common). The computers on display differed, but you'd see ZX Spectrum, C64, Oric Atmos, Amstrad CPC range and other lesser known players. But Apple was unknown. Not one, ever. If you wanted an Apple you needed to go to a specialist dealer, and generally they were few and far between and super expensive.

By the time the 16-bit computers came about, they were mainly in stores like Curry's and Dixon's, and very accessible. I had an Amiga 500, and most of my friends did too, except one poor chap with an Atari ST.

There was a one "mom and pop" type store in my town by the time I got to my late teens. They sold a lot of the big box Amigas, some PC's and import consoles like PC-Engine. But they closed in the late 90's. I remember buying a used black and white TV from their closing down sale for £10.

In the early days eg Late 70's Apple was defiantly the Luxury end of the market in the UK - the "consumer" Personal Computer as a mass market item didn't come until several years later.

Apple was luxury in the UK until the iMac. I remember looking at the Beige G3 hardware and it being 3 or more times more expensive than my beige no name PC. My first Mac was a 6100 years after it was obsolete. I wanted to play with Macs, but they were stupidly expensive at the time.

Apple claimed you got more for less by using the MacOS/MacSystem instead of DOS/Windows. Apple made a lot of money being different than Microsoft. Easier to use easier to configure easier to troubleshoot.

I got a Mac SE and Mac IIcx 6Macs and a G3 iMac. I don't use them I collected them over the years to see if they go up in value.

What really angered them was when Tramiel dropped the retail price without informing computer stores first, and without offering to refund the difference between the old a and new retail price.

But, yeah, Commodore burned their retail network in the US time and time and time again.

Among other things the incompetent Commodore management did. Here was a company that did "vertical integration" Apple-style before Apple. They had their own CPU, their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom. They had a platform years ahead of their peers (just compare a 1985 Amiga to a 1985 Mac). But CBM was epically mismanaged, terrible at marketing, but great at paying their CEO big salaries and bonuses.

>their own video chips, their own sound chips, custom

Commodore made sure to fire designers promptly after every new product launch. C-64 custom chip designers founded Ensoniq in 1982, the year C-64 launched. Amiga team was "let go" before Amiga 1000 to 500 cost optimization redesign. This meant Amiga never got HD floppy controller - there was no one capable of upgrading PLL inside Paula.

The original Amiga hardware (which was later sold as the 1000/500/2000) was developed by a startup which was later bought by Commodore. After the Amiga was a success, they failed to develop the platform further. Ok, it was arguably hard to introduce changes to the existing custom chips while keeping at least a degree of compatibility with old games that relied on all sorts of timing etc. details of the old hardware, but still... When the first Amigas with really improved capabilities (4000/1200) appeared in 1992, it was too little too late.

It is my understanding that a one time Commodore executives were the highest paid people in the microcomputer industry. Millions that could have gone in research, marketing, and just support programs vanished into the pockets of higher management even as Commodore was losing it's market share.

The Commodore 16 and Plus 4 flopped as did the Commodore 9000 machine. Commodore had a PC Clone called the PC-Colt but it didn't sell well. Commodore did little to no marketing in the USA. Everything was sold in toy stores.

R&D at Commodore was always notoriously underfunded compared to the competition and compared to their size. Which makes what they achieved at their height all the more incredible.

Oh, we got some warnings alright! On a friday we get a call saying we had to drop the price of item X by $50-$100 on Monday.

Then we had to deal with customers who had just bought the same item in the last week or so.

What would you have considered the normal/preferred way of handling this? After all, hardware price drops were normal, that's how the market was expanded; wouldn't it be the case that no matter when the price came down, someone would've bought it the previous day?

Maybe in US, that never happened in Iberian Peninsula.

Spain and the UK were a ZX Spectrum zone.

Portugal saw a bit of Amiga penetration (at least anecdotally judging from my social group). But yes no where near the Spectrum.

I had an Amiga 500 in Spain. You could see them in some stores, but I did never met anyone else who owned one.

See my sibling comment. I was the PC guy among the high school gang full with Amigas.

Weekends spent doing protacker session, checking content of newly traded floppies, trying to stuff in 68000, and then coming home and trying to replicate something on a 386SX.

And Amiga when 16 bit days arrived, and there was no problem getting Amiga 1000s even on my tiny town.

I was the only guy on computer gang that got a PC instead, due to the way my parents saw it as a safer bet for the money being invested. Somehow they were right, regarding how computer market evolved years later.

So I was floating between PC and Amiga demoscene.

I was 13 when I purchased mine on lawnmower money. Getting a tape drive to store the hours of peaking/poking the games from the magazines was amazing.

Just found my original 300 baud modem and hardware/software moving homes. War Games, once I found out it was created on a Commodore PET, was a huge influence at the time. Not sure if I have a single monitor with an RCA connector anymore.

I bought my C64 and 1541 drive from a Walgreens around 1984, in Piedmont, California.

It might not have been exactly a Walgreens, but it was that type of drug store, with the electronics behind the counter.

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