4 ms·

A lot of people are confusing the IIc with the IIc+. The former was a fairly early/popular "portable" apple II. It was superseded by the IIGS, a 16-bit machine

A lot of people are confusing the IIc with the IIc+. The former was a fairly early/popular "portable" apple II. It was superseded by the IIGS, a 16-bit machine that competed favorably (with respect to graphics/sound/etc) with the mac. The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25" floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way. Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly less expensive. Basically it was a fiasco of a product. Apple ][ timeline from wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_famil... So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early 1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc. Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.

Reason077 7y ago
I never used a //c+, but on the IIgs I remember the 3.5” floppy drive being a huge advantage. The 3.5” was faster and had much more capacity that the 5.25”, so the first thing you’d do on a IIgs was copy everything over to 3.5” floppies. My memory could be faulty, but I also don’t recall having compatibility issues between DOS and ProDOS. The big issue was 5.25” games, which would pull all sorts of low-level hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn’t be copied without special hacks.
- StillBored 7y ago
  Which is fine, because like most IIGS owners, you had both drives. The //c was the compact integrated apple II. It is all you needed. You could just buy a IIc, take it home plug it into your TV and there was a large software library. You never needed to buy another piece of hardware. The IIe/IIGS were expandable, you bought the machine, which by itself didn't do anything, then you bought a pile of peripherals. The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/+ came on 5.25". So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a "compact" standalone setup. The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks. A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.
russellbeattie 7y ago
I forgot about the IIGS. I remember walking through a mall and in the front of one of those boutique computer stores back then was a IIGS hooked up to a piano keyboard via MIDI and playing some amazing classical piece while it showed the notes on the screen in full color. It was amazing.

Reason077 7y ago

I never used a //c+, but on the IIgs I remember the 3.5” floppy drive being a huge advantage. The 3.5” was faster and had much more capacity that the 5.25”, so the first thing you’d do on a IIgs was copy everything over to 3.5” floppies. My memory could be faulty, but I also don’t recall having compatibility issues between DOS and ProDOS. The big issue was 5.25” games, which would pull all sorts of low-level hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn’t be copied without special hacks.

StillBored 7y ago
Which is fine, because like most IIGS owners, you had both drives. The //c was the compact integrated apple II. It is all you needed. You could just buy a IIc, take it home plug it into your TV and there was a large software library. You never needed to buy another piece of hardware. The IIe/IIGS were expandable, you bought the machine, which by itself didn't do anything, then you bought a pile of peripherals. The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/+ came on 5.25". So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a "compact" standalone setup. The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks. A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.

russellbeattie 7y ago

I forgot about the IIGS. I remember walking through a mall and in the front of one of those boutique computer stores back then was a IIGS hooked up to a piano keyboard via MIDI and playing some amazing classical piece while it showed the notes on the screen in full color. It was amazing.