The point is that the system monitor is in ROM, always accessible, and easy for a beginner to discover and experiment with. It feels part of the system in a way

The point is that the system monitor is in ROM, always accessible, and easy for a beginner to discover and experiment with. It feels part of the system in a way a disk-loaded monitor does not. Yes, the Apple II had several so-called "copy cards" that allowed you to interrupt a running program, explore memory, dump it to disk, etc. Very useful for debugging, and as you say, automatically cracking single-load programs. My Apple //e had a Senior PROM installed, which provides similar features without taking up a slot. I don't think you can compare the hardware accessories for the C64 with the wide variety of expansion cards available for the Apple II. You could really customize your hardware. My Apple //e had the above-mentioned Senior PROM, a CP/M card for running Turbo Pascal, a 4 MHz accelerator, 9-voice music card, an EPROM burner, and a "Quikloader" card that allowed me to put my most-used programs on EPROMs and have them instantly available at a moment's notice. Not quite like having a hard drive, but close. Later, I removed the CP/M card and music card I didn't use anymore and added 1 megabyte of battery-backed RAM. > The Apple II did not have the ability to talk to a printer or external disk drives without an interface card. And that means you could connect it to your choice of a parallel or serial printer (just get the appropriate kind of card), or go with third-party disk drives that had 2x or 4x the capacity. That's a good thing. Man, I feel like I'm 16 again, arguing with my Commodore-owning friends about who has the better computer. Thanks, this is fun.