> Clearer display

B&W 9" 512x384 vs Color Commodore 1080S 13" @ 640x256 or 640x512 interlaced and doubled as a great TV. Let's say you didn't want to use interlaced mode, the Amiga still was more productive because of its out of the box multi-screen functionality.

Flipping between screens on the Amiga was extremely fast, there was even a gesture for it (hold right click, then click) Multitasking is extremely important productivity.

I used to simultaneously do the following: Run a terminal program in the background for downloads or research, have my editor or productivity environment open in the foreground, and have auxillary utilities needed like graphic editors, music editors, running on background screens. It was years before MacOS even added cooperative multitasking (System7).

> but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years

Most of the innovative features did not require 35 years. Faster loaders, JiffyDOS, all existed in the 80s. Games already used sprite multiplexing, border knockouts, etc even as far back as the mid 80s. Digital audio was hipped in games like Great Giana Sisters, or Skate or Die. Have a look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetgpWY7WOg The C64 market, like game consoles today, was one of steady progressive of capabilities. Each year, things got better on the same hardware, and so the value of the HW was extended. That isn't so for the Apple II, whose graphical and sound capability sucked at the beginning, and pretty much plateaued early.

For anyone who had bought a C64, they would have felt less need to upgrade year after year, because the software library continued to push the limits.

> I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet.

PET was a player until VisiCalc, but you're talking about a market size of a few hundred thousand machines. Most business was stilling being conducted on timeshare machines at this time.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/3/

>You need to add a some things to those machines to be feature complete with a //c... at the very least a floppy disk drive. (And then you need to accept a disk with 3-4% the transfer rate of the Apple product.... I spent a bunch of time in my youth waiting for C64 software to load off disk.)

If you had an Epyx Fastloader or Action Replay, loading a 200 block program (usual top end size) would take about 4-5 seconds. JiffyDOS could load a factor of 15 times faster, taking that down to about 1-2 seconds. (JiffyDOS replaced the ROM in the 1541)

> So that's the Amiga 1000, which would need a 256K memory expansion, an external monitor, and some work to connect it all up, to be comparable to the Mac. (Admittedly, the Amiga has color, but the Mac had 384 line display without interlacing and was more portable.)

Amiga 1000 worked without RAM expansion. It started with 256k (2x the Mac128). If you add the A1050 256k expansion, it adds $199. The 1080S monitor had stereo speakers, took both RGBI and Component Video, so I would use mine to for both my computer and to watch TV, which was much higher quality than regular TVs. The 1084 usually sold for $300. So for $1800, you got a system with 512k RAM, Color, Stereo Speaker Monitor, that also functioned as a high quality TV.

As an aside, I hooked my Amiga up to a regular composite monitor/TV before I got the official Commodore monitor.

>The IIgs was introduced almost three years after the Mac 128K... why should it be surprising that it has some better capabilities than the earlier machine? (Probably more surprising is the fact that Apple kept the IIgs CPU as low as 2.8MHz.)

Not surprising, the IIgs was Woz's baby, the Mac128k was Job's baby. They deliberately hobbled the IIgs because it would make the Mac look bad. If they ran it at full CPU speed, it would have been faster, cheaper, in addition to looking and sounding better.

> This is a weird argument to make, because it essentially implies Apple has good enough marketing to convince people over 40 years to make non-economic choices. It seems more likely to me that Apple has, over the years, better been than most at assembling a set of capabilities that people find valuable enough to pay for.

I think it's not really disputed that Apple has a cultish following, and that their marketing creates a reality distortion field. The Mac IIcx for example, was introduced in 1991 for $10,000 in 2018 inflation adjusted dollars ($5000 in 1991). You really think the IIcx was 3-4 times better than a PC in 1991 or an Amiga 3000/4000? For a narrow few, who could afford to drop $10,000 on a IIcx and $16,000 on a Laserwriter, the costs may have been justified.

But if you were doing say, video or sound work, an Amiga or Atari ST, or Silicon Graphics workstation were far better. Which is why, the Amiga's niche was DTV while the Mac's was DTP. But an Amiga with a Video Toaster was still a cheaper setup than a Mac with a LaserWriter, think about that. You could produce a show like Babylon-5 with Amigas, but with a setup costing 3 times as much, you could print some flyers.

I was typesetting documents with TeX in 1991 producing output far superior than what I saw coming out of professional Mac apps, and with far less intervention, for 10 times less cost.

It seems to me that the cost/benefit was not justified by Apple's markup on Macs, and you'd be better served by something 80% as good, but 1/2 the price.

Apple actually almost failed as a company three times, in 1993, 1997, and again in 2001, they had huge declines. The iPod and iPhone are what rescued the company, and in hindsight, the Apple II and Mac classic were basically also-rans. They mostly failed from a marketshare and software library perspective, that managed to extract a premium in niche markets, but so did many workstation vendors.