On April 16, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, one of the first pre-built desktop computers, although it wouldn’t ship until June of that year. It went on to sell about 6 million units over the course of the next 17 years, making it the longest lived and most successful of the three prebuilt micro computers that arrived on the market in 1977.
How the Apple II was different from earlier micros
The innovation with the Apple II was that shipped in usable form. Earlier microcomputers shipped either as kits like the Altair 8800, which required assembly from individual electronic components, or as a board like the Apple I, that still required additional parts to make a functioning computer. Building up an Altair 8800 from a kit could take months. The Apple I was much easier to build but could still consume a weekend.
In its original configuration, an Apple II sold for $1,295 with 4 KB of RAM, and it plugged into a household cassette tape recorder for storage. Apple did not sell monitors until 1983, so you could either acquire a composite security monitor or a third-party RF modulator that allowed you to use it with a television. The Apple II still required some setup, but you could clear off a table, unbox a new Apple II, and connect it to a TV and a tape recorder and enter the world of computing in a couple of hours, even if you’d never done anything like that before.
How the Apple II was different from other 1977 micros
The Apple II was more expensive than the TRS-80 Model 1 and Commodore PET, the two other prebuilt microcomputers that launched in 1977. But it was the most versatile machine of the three, including being the only one that had color. This came at the expense of costing more and also requiring a separate display. The TRS-80 and PET had built-in monochrome displays. And the PET even had a built in tape recorder.
The popular narrative today is that the Apple II was the only one of the three that was successful. But all three of them sold much better than expected. All three of them had a difficult time meeting demand. The Apple II lasted the longest of the three, but that had more to do with its architecture than how well it sold early on.
The disk drive is another reason people cite for the Apple II’s success, because Steve Wozniak devised a very efficient and inexpensive-to-build disk interface that cost less than the designs anyone else was using. But Apple priced it at $595, which was $96 more than Radio Shack charged for its disk drive. The inexpensive disk drive did more to ensure profitability than it did to drive consumer adoption of disk drives, because Apple pocketed the difference rather than passing the savings on.
Commodore’s disk drive was the costliest of the three to make, but Commodore cut its price the most aggressively of the three.
Expandability
The major reason the Apple II was successful so much longer than the other members of the class of 1977 was its expandability. The case wasn’t even bolted shut. The top attached with hook and loop, practically begging you to open it. If you obliged and opened the lid, you found eight expansion slots inside. The expansion slots made it very easy to expand its capabilities. Virtually anything that you can get on an expansion card for a PC today had an equivalent during the lifetime of the Apple II.
Expanding a PET or TRS-80 was possible, but was a more cumbersome affair. The PET opened up like the hood of a car, but didn’t have any expansion slots. Adding capabilities to a PET or TRS-80 required designing circuit boards that could plug into an existing chip socket.
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.
so Apple IIe c were significant update on the Apple II?
my school system districts 1980s were Apple IIe c and Apple IIe c works and Oregon Trails
The IIe and IIc had the double hi-res graphics mode that the original Apple II and II Plus lacked and also had the ability to address more memory. My IIe and IIc both have 128K of RAM.
was double hi-res graphics mode competitive with CGA and Tandy 16 color
which is better in 1985 Apple IIe c and Apple IIe c, C64 or Tandy 1000ex
The right programmer could make any of those graphics standards work so it’s hard to say which one was better.
You keep asking me what was better, this random platform or this other random platform or a C-64. It’s subjective. For me, the C-64 was the best all around. But the best computer in 1985 was the one you had.