More on Commodore, Apple, and the Inchoate Personal Computer Era

Jason Snell:

If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home computer anyone had ever seen at that point. It was laughably underpowered … but: it was only $300! They sold a million of ’em.)

Snell takes issue (correctly!) with Drew Saur’s framing of the Apple II as “corporate”. As Snell points out, Commodore was founded by a suit — Apple was founded by two guys whose first collaboration was making phone-phreaking blue boxes.

But a more pertinent point was made by Dr. Drang on Mastodon:

I don’t want to get on the bad side of @gruber and @jsnell, but when they say the Commodore 64 cost $600, that’s misleading. Yes, it cost $600 when it was released, but its price dropped quickly. By the time I bought one in late ’83 or early ’84, it was selling for $200 at Kmart. To recognize that it was a great computer for the price, you have to know what that price really was.

When I wrote the other day that the C64 cost $600, it didn’t jibe with my memory. But my thinking is too set in the ways of Apple, where a computer debuts at a price and then stays at that price. A price around $200 is more what I remember for the C64, at a time when a bare-bones IIe cost $1,400. Inflation-adjusted, $200 in 1984 is about $620 today, and $1,400 is about $4,300. That’s why so many more kids of my era got their parents to spring for a Commodore 64 but not an Apple II. They were rivals in some sense, but really, the Apple II was a different class of computer, and cost nearly an order of magnitude more. Inflation-adjusted, it’s very similar to the difference in both price and capabilities of the Meta Quest versus Vision Pro.

(Me, I didn’t own a computer until I went to college. My parents wouldn’t buy me one because they feared if they did, I’d never leave the house. I resented it at the time, but in hindsight, they might have been right. I didn’t fight too hard because we had an Atari 2600 and a generous budget for game cartridges. Plus, my grade school had a few Apple IIe’s (alongside a bunch of cheap TI-99/4A’s), and my middle/high school had an entire lab of Apple IIe’s and IIc’s.)

★ Wednesday, 16 July 2025