> You both seem to be enjoying the back and forth,

Speaking for myself, yes. :-)

Something I should point out here is that I grew up with reasonable access to both machines: Apple ][s and C64's. (My elementary school had a lab for each, across the hall from each other.) My exposure to the C64 was through a combination of my school's being in a Logo educational pilot program (based on Seymour Papert's work) and my mother running the C64 lab. That gave me some formal introduction to Logo in class, and then a bunch of after hours time, where I got a chance to explore further, including Commodore BASIC, setting the hardware up, etc.

This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths: the SID and the VIC II. Because I wasn't a personal machines (they were at the school), it also meant that I wasn't exactly buying things like extension BASICs and fast disk loaders.... so I'm biased towards feeling a bit more of the pain of the limited BASIC and slow disk interface. I still remember the disappointment trying to get graphics on the C64 screen in BASIC, given how easy it was in C64 Logo and in the Applesoft BASIC on the Apple ]['s across the hall.

I also tend, probably mostly thanks to my high school Physics teachers, to be more sympathetic towards the Apple ][ platform. While there's no doubt the C64 has better graphics and sounds (at least for games), I also saw some amazing things done with Apple ][ machines into the early 90's. My middle school had one with a Corvus hard disk and a barcode scanner that ran the library. My shop teacher had one with a plotter and a CAD system. My band directors used them to organize their operations. My physics teachers had an elaborate system for custom test generation and real-time grading, in addition to basic Sonar hardware (from a Polaroid camera) for supporting student experiments. So... while I'm very personally sympathetic to the Commodore 64, I do take objection to the notion that the C64 was uniformly 'far more powerful' than the Apple. (Which was why I made my initial response, in fact.)

Whatever additional power there is in the C64 can probably be explained by the fact that it's five years newer... and I still saw relatively standard Apple's doing things that still seem outside the capabilities of the C64.

Another way to look at this is that if you'd asked me then which platform I'd have chosen, there's not much doubt I would picked the Commodore. If you sent the current me back in time and then asked me to pick, I'd probably go with the Apple. As much as I like the built in hardware on the C64, I'd be hard pressed to walk away from Apple features like expansion slots, the faster disk, the 80 column display, AppleWorks, the standard way to get to 128K, etc.

This is this kind of thought process that has me objecting to the thesis that Apple has achieved its success solely by selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field. Even if it didn't spawn a demo scene, even if people aren't chasing the beam with cycle accurate 6510 code, the unique features the Apple did have seem more useful to me than any of that.

> So many missed opportunities by Commodore.

Agreed, without a doubt. (Starting with the 1541 disk performance, the keyboard on the PET, and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA. It's 2018, and there are still people worried about the water quality around the plant.)