Apple II

“They intentionally targeted non-motorcycle users in the way that Steve Jobs intentionally targeted non-technical users with the Apple II.”

“Radio Shack and Commodore had made a calculated decision. They wanted to be appliance companies. They kept their technical specifications secret, hoping to monopolize the market for peripherals and software.”

“That was the power of the open architecture. Every third-party company that made a product for the Apple II became, in effect, a marketing arm for Apple. Every ad they bought, every review they got, every innovation they created made the Apple II more valuable…”

“VisiCalc could only run on the Apple II. And this wasn't because of some brilliant strategy. It was completely accidental. The Apple II just happened to be the only computer with everything VisiCalc needed. Enough RAM to hold the spreadsheet, a proper keyboard…”

“By 1983, the Apple II would become the first computer to sell a million units.”

“In today's money, they'd lost at least a billion dollars on the Apple III, all of it subsidized by the Apple II's success.”

“Job's closed system only worked because Wozniak's open system funded them. The Apple II kept the company alive for years. Its profits bankrolled everything that came after. Those eight expansion slots Wozniak fought for Became the financial engine that allowed…”

“And the beautiful part about that was I could pay for it out of my own savings. He is He's 13 years old.”

“This is, you know, classic disruption that the new thing tends to be crap at the stuff that was important for the old thing, but then it does something different that's new. And if you test an LLM by asking it to do complex logic problems or masquerade problem…”

“So like the Apple deal is 31,000 dollars for eight years. Of access for Apple, for the Apple II to Microsoft's BASIC.”

“If we don't cannibalize our business, Two guys or two gals in a garage are. So isn't it better that we create a Macintosh that kills an Apple II, or we create an iPhone, iPod, iPad that kills a Macintosh? Isn't it better we kill it than somebody else kills it?”

“The original Mac that was like seven or eight grand in today's money. The original Mac, the Apple II was like six or seven grand in today's money adjusted for inflation.”

“I built asteroid type games, and there was a way to in a primitive way, go to Radio Shack and buy these knob potentiometers and wire them up to the Apple II and build a primitive game controller, and I can remember having my siblings come down and play this ch…”

“So we designed this mouse and a word processor and a spreadsheet and a database All for the Apple II with a graphical user interface about a year before the Macintosh was released.”

“Steve Jobs actually sends the Shannons he assembles an Apple II and sends it to Claude. So they have one of the only Apple IIs, I guess, that was assembled by Steve Jobs himself.”

“We think it's like, this is the Apple II, like the Oculus is the Apple II. And, you know, if you go back and look at it wasn't until 81 when the PC came out that it really kind of exploded. So we're a couple of years away, but it's very, very clear what you ne…”