Apple never did bare bones

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 24 April 2008 09:49

Opinion and Analysis

Every now and again, people come up with suggestions about what sort of computer Apple should make, but currently doesn't.

A reader's letter to Low End Mac included the line "I'd love to see Apple return to its roots and sell a bare bones computer. That's what the Apple I was..."

That's an interesting kind of revisionism.

The Apple I might have been "bare bones" in the sense that it didn't include a case (that didn't arrive until the Apple II), but by the standards of the day it was unusually well featured - a trend that the company has continued. Apple generally doesn't offer minimal specifications with the primary purpose of advertising them at low prices as a starting point for optioning-up to more realistic, more expensive and also more profitable configurations.

At a time when most personal computers needed an external terminal or came with a hex keypad and seven-segment display, the Apple I featured built-in text and graphics support with a composite video interface, plus a connector allowing a full ASCII keyboard to be plugged in.

So it might have been "bare bones" by today's standards, but compared with other popular models of the day such as the KIM-1, it was quite impressive.

Of course, the Apple II, Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80 soon brought in a new era of ready-to-go computing at prices that were still far from reaching a mass market but were within reach of many people that hankered for their own computers but lacked the skills needed to build them from kits.