A fair technological evaluation of the Apple II design can only be made against contemporary designs which reached the market around the 1977 timeframe.
The SOl-20 - you needed to buy several extra components to match the Apple II capabilites in graphics and Apple's built in BASIC, which drove up the price. This is the machine that came closest to getting my money instead of the Apple II. However, the SOL was really a previous generation S-100 machine in disguise. Once the Apple II became established, there was no compelling reason to buy an S-100 bus machine. The Apple II had similar expandability, with built in color and built in basic for a lower overall cost. If the Apple II was anything, it was the S-100 bus killer. I'm sure that is what Jobs and Wozniak had designed it to be, and they hit the bullseye.
The Commodore Pet and the Radio Shack TRS-80 are two other contemorary machines to compare the Apple II against. Neither had color or anything near the expandability. To counter this, the Apple II, cost more money, but many customers were willing to pay the price to get color and the expansion capabilities.
Ohio scientific challenger - poor busines practices and poor software killed this one.
There were many other machines around, but these were the main contenders.By the end of the 1970's, the Apple II hardware design wasn't current. Apple knew it and was fevorishly working on the ill-fated Apple III. However, the Apple II system was expandable enough to outlast many contemporary and later machines. Having a large customer base and tremendous application software support, didn't hurt.
Regards, Mike Willegal Quincy wrote:
Thomas Richter wrote:It has rarely to do with the hardware capabilities of the systems. The decision makers rarely had a clue about the hardware in first place, and other factors are just more important (pricing, discount for education, long term support,...).An Atari salesman would have sounded something like this: "This 'Apple' company will go bankrupt within a few years, Atari is a billion dollar company and will dominate the personal computer industry. IBM is too late to the game. Apple will soon be forgotten and have no impact on the future of personal computing." The Atari 800 had terrific support chips for ye olde faithful 6502, scanline based interrupts, sprites and a sane coloration scheme. Woz's budget color scheme is best suited for those times when you are drawing a picture of an ORANGE cat sitting on the GREEN grass, against a BLUE sky, smelling a MAGENTA colored flower.