The C64 was much more game-ready out of the box, with a joystick port, an excellent sound chip and hardware sprites. Also I think the C64 had a decent disk driv

The C64 was much more game-ready out of the box, with a joystick port, an excellent sound chip and hardware sprites. Also I think the C64 had a decent disk drive available at launch, which the Spectrum never really got one of. Perhaps the best thing about the Spectrum was that the manual, which documented the built in BASIC programming language and also the Z80 asm opcodes. Edit: I should probably steer clear of culture war topics but let's be honest - the designers cut every corner they could think of and consequently the Spectrum looked and sounded atrocious compared to the luxurious C64. But I probably do owe my tech career to one.