Dave Farquhar
Experienced Member
I was a Commodore fan 20 years ago, and have more allegiance to Asus today than to anyone else. I never converted to Apple.
But anyway, yeah, Apple's margins were sky-high. Commodore had some advantage because they were making so many of their own chips while Apple had to buy everything (including some chips from Commodore or its licensees). The price war took out a lot of companies, and ultimately it turned out that it hurt Commodore too. The funny thing is though, when you read Infoworld's archives, in 1984 it sure seemed like Apple was the less healthy of the two companies. I do think Commodore made up some of the difference in volume. Apple sold 5-6 million Apple IIs (all models); Commodore sold 30 million C-64s, 4 million C-128s, and 2.5 million VIC-20s. That's a lot of machines, especially for that era.
I always heard that the later lever-door 1541s were better. I had a trapdoor 1541 for a couple of years and it did fine; at my school they had both, but under those conditions (running mostly PD software and almost no stuff with copy prevention) you'd expect them to stay in alignment. My 1571 did really well for many years after we upgraded. I still have our 128 but need to figure out what's wrong with it. Probably the power supply. My mom used the 128 for word processing into the mid 1990s. It had a good run.
But anyway, yeah, Apple's margins were sky-high. Commodore had some advantage because they were making so many of their own chips while Apple had to buy everything (including some chips from Commodore or its licensees). The price war took out a lot of companies, and ultimately it turned out that it hurt Commodore too. The funny thing is though, when you read Infoworld's archives, in 1984 it sure seemed like Apple was the less healthy of the two companies. I do think Commodore made up some of the difference in volume. Apple sold 5-6 million Apple IIs (all models); Commodore sold 30 million C-64s, 4 million C-128s, and 2.5 million VIC-20s. That's a lot of machines, especially for that era.
I always heard that the later lever-door 1541s were better. I had a trapdoor 1541 for a couple of years and it did fine; at my school they had both, but under those conditions (running mostly PD software and almost no stuff with copy prevention) you'd expect them to stay in alignment. My 1571 did really well for many years after we upgraded. I still have our 128 but need to figure out what's wrong with it. Probably the power supply. My mom used the 128 for word processing into the mid 1990s. It had a good run.