January 1, 1983: Apple launches the Apple IIe, the third mannequin within the Apple II collection — and the final earlier than the Macintosh will arrive a yr later.
It proves a giant vendor, and proof constructive of the Apple II model’s sustained worth.
Apple IIe: The unplanned replace
The Apple IIe took over from the Apple II Plus. Initially, Apple deliberate to desert the Apple II with that mannequin and change the product line with the Apple III. Nonetheless, the continued recognition of the Apple II, and the failure of the Apple III — largely due to its excessive value and a few evident engineering faults — pushed Apple to improve its confirmed hit product for one more go-round. (In the long run, Apple continued producing some model of the Apple II till the early Nineteen Nineties.)
The Apple IIe added as commonplace a few of the performance that Apple II fanatics already loved, due to the brand new mannequin’s spectacular variety of enlargement slots. Options included 80-column text-mode assist, 64KB of RAM (expandable as much as 128KB) and, for the primary time, lowercase letters!
It additionally dropped the chip depend on the motherboard from greater than 100 to simply 31. That allow Apple squeeze out extra revenue from every machine offered. In truth, the Apple IIe offered for roughly 3 times greater than the pc price to fabricate.
A crucial and industrial success
The Apple IIe acquired a fantastic reception upon its launch. Byte journal described it as “like having an Apple II with all of the extras in-built … with a wide range of thrilling new options and capabilities” for little further price.
The pc produced sturdy gross sales numbers, transferring 60,000 to 70,000 models monthly by Could 1983. (This was about twice the common of its predecessor, the Apple II Plus.) And the brand new pc had legs: The Apple IIe continued because the bestselling Apple II mannequin even after Cupertino launched its successor, the Apple IIc, in 1984.
At a time when Apple’s different computer systems, the Lisa (launched the identical month) and the Apple III, did not catch on, the Apple IIe stacked up as an undisputed winner.
Do you bear in mind the Apple IIe? Did you personal one? Tell us within the feedback beneath.
