I have! And I own a IIe and a IIc and I’ve used Apple machines side by side with Commodore, Atari, and Tandy machines. They all have things they did well and they all had limitations too. The Apple II line sold 6 million units in total, which works out to around half a million units per year in an era where Commodore and Tandy were selling a million units a year. The Apple II line was successful and profitable. But Steve Jobs very much exaggerated how successful it was, and frankly, how good it was. The best machine all around of that era was the Atari 800 and that line sold around 4 million units. The best machine doesn’t always win. Otherwise we’d all be reading this on Amigas right now.

Apple is an interesting company. They were not the only company doing interesting things in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s hip and cool these days to have Apple-centric tunnel vision about the era, but you miss out when you do. If you admire Apple’s success and want to replicate it, you have to understand the company’s struggles too. Of all the companies I mentioned in this blog post, Apple is the only one still making computers. But that doesn’t mean they get to change history, and that doesn’t invalidate what other companies like Tandy did and what we can learn from them. I could even argue that if the everything was as perfect in the 80s as Jobs claimed it was, why did Apple fire him? And after he came back, why did he copy Tandy’s business model? Why did he need Apple stores?

I’ve offended Apple fans with this piece and I’ve offended some Tandy fans with this piece. That’s a pretty good indication that I told the story fairly.