(You should keep in mind that I'm writing this in a spirit of friendly disagreement/discussion more than anything else... it's fun to think about these machines from my childhood... and I had formative experiences with both Apples and Commodores. :-) )

I think at least part of our disagreement is a disagreement on personal priorities.

Just to illustrate:

> Seriously, go grab a Mac 128k, and grab an Amiga 1000, and tell me which computer you're more productive on. You could use an original Amiga 1000 today and still have a pleasant experience, whereas the original Mac is agonizing to use.

Having used both machines, there's almost no chance I'd pick the Amiga, unless I wanted to play a game. The clearer display alone is a huge advantage. (In fact, I remember regretting the negative experience of a video producing high school friend of mine who I'd convinced to buy an Amiga 500. He had a much better experience a year or two later when he switched over to a PC.)

> Because the hardware was so exploitable in this way, it encouraged a never ending competition of creativity and innovation in its use that hasn't even subsided until this day. I mean, just in 2018, 44Khz digital audio was demonstrated on the C64

Very impressive and a testament to the skill of the developers involved... but I'm not sure how useful it is to ask people to wait 35 years for their hardware's capabilities to be fully realized. Whatever my current machine will have been convinced to do in 35 years time is not likely to matter to me all that much, and certainly means nothing now.

So, while the flexibility of the hardware is nice and all, the hidden capabilities are only useful to the extent developers are forced by resource constraints to find them. The Atari 2600 had the same sort of thing... people were making it do amazing things into the 80's because they had to do so to gain access to a market, not because they found it a desirable property of the hardware to be forced into it.

(Note that recent demo coders that use these platforms as ways to challenge themselves are in a different category altogether.)

> Most offices used PCs.

Until the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 1983, it was very common for companies to buy Apple ][s for the express purpose of running VisiCalc. I'm not sure Commodore ever seriously played in that space with any of their machines, including the Pet.

> When you say cheaper, you neglect to say HOW MUCH cheaper. The Apple IIc was $1300.The C64 was priced at $600, and the C128 was actually priced at $300.

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.)

> more than all Apple models combined. The Amiga 1000 sold for $1300 at launch, compared to the Mac which sold for $2500.

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.)

> The original Mac128K was inferior to the Apple IIgs in many ways, and it was hellishly expensive.

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.)

> the usual Apple script of charging a ton of money for a less capable computer.

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.