Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

["winston19842005@yahoo.com" <winston19842005@yahoo.com>]

On Apr 4, 12:49 pm, "N.N. Thayer" <nntha...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 4, 10:02 am, "Payton Byrd" <plb...@bellsouth.no.spam.net>
> wrote:
>
> > I was wrong on the year and the man, but the result is the same.  In 1983, the VIC-20 reached 1 million units
> > sold in less than 1 year on the market, and that was in comparison to 700,000 units sold of Apple II at the same
> > point in time.  Of course, the Apple II had been on the market for nearly six years at that point, so the sales rate
> > was about 10:1 taking time into consideration.  Woz proclaimed "Sales shot sky high.  Apple was the first company
> > to sell a hundred thousand computers; a million computers."  That was in an interview with the BBC that aired in
> > December 2003.  
>
> 1983 makes much more sense than 1981, as 1979-1982 was the height of
> the Apple II's sales and market influence relative to other
> microcomputers.  During that time, applications and games were written
> first and foremost for the Apple II platform - see any computer
> magazine from that time for reference (a good example is Computer
> Gaming World, archive athttp://cgw.vintagegaming.org).  Woz has
> claimed that from 1980 to at least 1982, the Apple II(+) was the best-
> selling microcomputer; I find this claim to be perfectly reasonable.

Well, do you have figures? During the 1979 to 1984 timeframe the TI-99
was a best-seller, selling over 2 million consoles. Most of these
sales were after the 99/4A was introduced in 1981.

People always claim (wrongly) the TI-99 was expensive to expand. But
one of TI's ads at the time showed a fully expanded system with
printer, with the text that said something like "Steve Jobs can't give
you this much computer for the money"