The Apple II: IRRELEVANT outside the USA!

Рет қаралды 690

Күн бұрын

In this video I invite the ire of the Apple Fanboys and explain why I believe the Apple II was an irrelevant system outside of the USA when compared to its competition such as the ZX Spectrum Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC etc.
Let me know what you think down below in the comments.
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Пікірлер: 25

@igorperuchi2114 9 ай бұрын

For the british market, which is the reference point for the author of this video, the Apple II was certainly irrelevant. There were lots of options in the UK market, heck you even got a computer built just for schools, tailor-made from the state media! But you see, Apple II's were huge in the learning field in other countries, I'm from Brazil and I've learned BASIC on an Apple II on a computing school. They were computers to do serious stuff, not much for games.

@ncot_tech 9 ай бұрын

I'd never heard of an Apple II until I started looking at retro computers. It seems to me they were the American equivalent of a BBC Micro, but with Apple style pricing 😆

@JasperTedVidalTale 9 ай бұрын

The Apple II is more similar to the ZX Spectrum. First reason is because both graphics aren't up to snuff to the BBC Micro or even the Amstrad CPC (The Apple 2 does have a slight edge over the ZX Spectrum but only because it didn't have the color clash). Second reason is that both systems didn't have a Sound Chip instead they just slap in a Speaker and then the CPU is going to be the one who directly controls the Audio therefore playing music while doing other tasks is impossible unless you are willing to make sacrifices Or you can like what most ZX Beeper games do is that just put music on things where nothing is going on Like the title screen for example

@81632bit 9 ай бұрын

That's a pretty good description of Apples approach, IMHO.

@little_fluffy_clouds 9 ай бұрын

Grew up in Europe and the Middle East in the ‘80s and I’ve never seen or heard of an Apple II. Commodore and Spectrum dominated the home microcomputer scene, followed by Amstrad CPC.

@jottka2162 9 ай бұрын

You forgot Atari.

@delsydsoftware 9 ай бұрын

My family purchased an Apple IIc with a monochrome monitor in 1984 for $1500. That's basically $4500 in 2024 dollars. Apple got away with that kind of pricing because they offered an Apple credit card with a high enough limit to cover the entire purchase plus accessories and games. That was the only way we could afford to get the machine. The IIc was a pretty slick design. It had 128k of ram, a built in floppy drive, and built in hardware for serial, external printers, 80 column mode, etc. It was the equivalent of a fully expanded IIe, but in a slimline case with no expansion ports. In a lot of ways, it was the Apple II equivalent of the Commodore 128D or the Amiga 500. In contrast, the IBM PC AT came out the same year for $6000, which would be almost $19,000 USD today. People talk about the Apple tax today, but they had nothing on IBM in the 1980s :) On the plus side, there were thousands of games released for the Apple II. But, the hardware was a huge pain to program. Steve Wozniak had designed the Apple chipset to be as cheap and compact as possible. But, this meant that addressing the graphics screen was stupidly difficult, and everything was CPU bound. The IIe and IIc had a 16 color double hi-res mode, but it was even more complicated to program, so most games just used the standard 7 color mode. The simple chipset design also meant that you could write custom code for reading and writing tracks to the disk. That lead to increasingly complicated and slow disk copy protection schemes in commercial games, which meant that cracked games often loaded much faster than the originals. The pirate games scene was huge.

@81632bit 9 ай бұрын

See, here in the UK, there wasn't a scheme like that. And certainly in the late 70s through to the mid to late 80s, purchasing high value items on credit cards wasn't hugely common in the UK. And the competition was, as I say in the video, vastly cheaper. A ZX Spectrum would have cost £175 for the 48k model back in 1982 (equivalent to roughly £700 today).

@thrillington2008 9 ай бұрын

I'm from America and I remember seeing Apple ][ computers and later Macintosh PCs in various schools I attended in the 90s and 2ks. It was a common sight in public schools here.

@bitwize 9 ай бұрын

Part of the reason why is because that madlad Wozniak didn't even build color circuitry into the Apple II. Rather he exploited the characteristics of the NTSC color signal standard to generate color output from a high-res monochrome signal. All of this was perfectly useless on PAL sets; to get color on a PAL Apple II, assuming you could get your hands on one, you needed a special color expansion card. At which point, given the total price, that ZX Spectrum looked like a really tempting alternative...

@alexanderwingeskog758 9 ай бұрын

Yep grew up in Sweden and Apple II was not a thing here... Spectrum at first then Commodore (C20, C64, C/D128, Amiga), and Atari ofc... And we also had domestic computers like the ABC series of computers... ABC 80 was I guess a competitor for Apple II and Spectrum 48k. ABC80 had semi compiled BASIC and was pretty fast with it's 3 Mhz Z80. Assembler though was faster on ZX48 because +500 Khz more clock speed, but it would not beat it in BASIC. I remember (think it was before I actually got my C64) I did a BASIC course, and it was on the ABC80... in the 80's...

@AlbertHamik1 9 ай бұрын

I think one detail you sort of glossed over here (not intentionally at least) was that the home computer markets of Europe and America wildly differed where adoption for playing games was concerned. In Europe you had multiple platforms and yet also a burgeoning cottage industry of multiple developers hopped onto the scene to make a multitude of different games appealing to a broad market. In the US, only a couple computer systems really took off, and gaming on computers was largely a niche thing until the 90s rolled around. Prince of Persia wasn't even a success on the Apple ][, as it took being ported to other systems and game consoles for it to take off. We had developers but they were skewing towards a smaller audience for much of the 80s. The PC taking off in the 90s is when the playing field became even, as while European developers would take to the 16-bit home console market quickly, American developers were finally finding a rewarding niche within the booming PC market. It's fascinating how much of a difference there was between the American and European computer gaming markets.

@81632bit 9 ай бұрын

I'm going to disagree with you there. The Commodore 64 was massively successful in the US, and had a very large and very successful games market throughout the 1980s.

@AlbertHamik1 9 ай бұрын

@@81632bit I wasn't necessarily saying the C64 wasn't a success here. It most definitely was. But we didn't have the sizeable game market as that in Europe. The market was different here than in Europe and trended eventually in the direction of an older and more niche segment of that market which had stuck around for the games, especially those to join the early BBS systems and foster the early shareware scene. And again, the ball was mostly in the court of the platforms that most people eventually had access to, such as the Apple computers and the PC (clones). The Amiga was definitely not as successful here as in Europe, and where it was popular was in media production as opposed to gaming. I think it's the fact that the few early success stories we had in computer game publishing were quick to hop the pond to publish their stuff to a more agreeable market overseas can make it seem that the US market was just as vibrant and productive as its European counterpart. At a certain point in the 80s, the American market had calcified into just a few dominant computer platforms AND dominant game publishers. It would be the 90s that shifted the balance and the American segment of the computer gaming market would finally come into its own as the handful of developers that stuck it out there had figured out what they wanted to do and hit upon winning formulas that would massively shape the landscape of computer (essentially just PC gaming by a certain point) for the 90s to early-mid 00s. Also, this is pure theorizing, but I'd say that the one thing that really locked off much of the European gaming market to anything but the US, besides how annoying it was (apparently) to port from PAL to NTSC systems, was that for much of the 80s the European computer game market resembled what was happening for home consoles and arcades in the US and Japan. A segment which in the case of the American market practically went stagnant for a decent chunk of the 80s when we had the localized crash of 83. Of course there was the ambitious titles, and those actually did see ports to NTSC territories, but by and large it seems US appetite for European titles just never took off. As an example, we didn't see a boom in 2D platformers for home computers here, and it took until Commander Keen for an American developer to hit upon a winning formula in that segment, which would be a fleeting moment because as you probably know, the developer of that game would turn around and create the massive market of the FPS genre with their big winners in Wolfenstein 3D and, ultimately, Doom. There is practically a hard cutoff in home computer game development between the early 80s up to the early 90s, and for that first segment it was European dominance that American gamers were largely unaware of, with a few exceptions in the category of early BBS scroungers, the warez people and actual developers figuring out the platforms though how much of an impression the European market made on them is up to individual stories it seems.

@claudiadarling9441 9 ай бұрын

Of all the 8-bit era computers, the BBC Micro seems the best value for money. Easy expandability of the Apple II, but with superior graphics and Sophie Wilson’s superior Basic. In the US I think a lot of us have find memories of the Apple II because they were in the schools. Apple made sever discounts on equipment and software for schools. Even into the 90s we still had II’s sitting next to newer systems because of the huge library of software written for them. I think the most popular home machines were the Commodore machines.

@paulforester6996 9 ай бұрын

All the apple was is the American version of the bbc computer. Both computers were put in the classroom with government support. They served the same purpose, and that is how they were alike.

@81632bit 9 ай бұрын

Bit different. The BBC was created after the UK Government actively went searching for a computer to put in schools (the ZX Spectrum was also a contender for this prime role), whereas Apple approached the US Government about getting the Apple II into schools. Same outcome though.