Begging pardon, 1986, two years after the Mac. It also beat the Mac to market with a color GUI and ADB keyboards and mice. But yup, hardware-wise it was kneecapped from the start (1MHz IO bus, 65816 cpu would never rival m68k, low cpu clock speed) entirely for marketing reasons.

Yes, if the Mac never existed then the //GS and GS/OS would have looked quite different but they still would have existed in some form. With no Mac upgrade path, it's likely that all the different Apple II form factors would have been upgraded with the 65816 to give the platform more life. Then a next generation "Apple IV" system might have combined a 68K and 65816 to offer 32-bit performance and Apple II backwards compatibility like the PS2 having a PS1 built in. (Apologies rbanffy, I wrote this before seeing that you posted almost the same idea earlier.)

Not only 4 years after, but it had a slower 65816 to make sure it wasn't faster than a Mac.

I often wonder what a 65832 (or 65864) would look like. For instance, I'd add instructions treating all registers as floating point (fp32 and fp64). And have full 32/64 bits data buses.