> Sorry, but best estimates of actual Commodore 64 sales are roughly 12.5 million, not 22 million. Still, there's no doubt that they handily outsold Apple II's.

> Sorry, but best estimates of actual Commodore 64 sales are roughly 12.5 million, not 22 million. Still, there's no doubt that they handily outsold Apple II's. It leaves out the C128 sales, which is like leaving out the IIe/IIc. > "[Apple] made up for it only in superior marketing" (emphasis mine) ignores quite a few other factors. I wish I could agree, but from a HW perspective, Apple was doing a bad job. They had years and a ton of revenues from the Apple II, and failed to significantly innovate in HW. From a software perspective, they were much better than Commodore. Look, I had a Mac 128k in 1985 and an Amiga 1000, and although Mac OS and its DTP software was better in some respects than the Amiga, the HW was not, with the exception of LocalTalk/AppleTalk. I also think you are ignoring why parents often bought computers for their kids in the 1980s -- because the kids asked for them. Because they could play games. It just so happened they could also be used for education tasks, but huge numbers of people were inspired to go into STEM because of playing games on early 8-bit computers, and then asking "How did they make this?" For computers like the C64, lots of kids would type in game source code published in magazines like Compute! Gazette!, run the games, and when they got bored of them, they'd modify them. It was the early open-source model, learn by forking. Most of my friends asked their parents for computers because of the sexy graphics and sound. They then serendipitously learned from them. So whether the numbers are 12 million or 17 million or 22 million, I'm willing to bet there are far more engineers of my generation who cut their teeth on a C64, Atari, Spectrum ZX, or an Amstrad, because of the flashy graphics and games, then the children of parents who read splashy Apple full page ads talking about how 'educational' they were. What's my point of of these rants? It seems unlike criticism of Commodore, people can't deal with any criticism of Apple Hagiography, that after shipping the first Apple 2 in 1978, they stagnated, and were never good at HW innovation. The lionization of the Apple 2 ignores the reality of the world of millions of Europeans who never saw one, effectively cementing an American viewpoint of 8-bit computing.