Commodore destroyed their dealer network in the US by mistreating them during the C64 days. The worst probably being Jack Tramiels parting shot as Commodore CEO when he cut recommended retail prices overnight without warning dealers or offering any refunds/discounts to deal with the massive drop in the value of their inventory he caused.

Conversely in Europe where local Commodore subsidiaries did well in many countries, Apple was a tiny presence most places until the Mac.

I pretty much lived in the local computer stores in Norway in the 80s and never saw any Apple 2 variant for example. Apple was a non-entity to me, even though I knew of obscure brands like Dragon and Enterprise 64.

Commodore dominated the home computer market in Norway, with Atari, Spectrum and Amstrad following shortly after, and a variety of smaller players..

Once the Mac arrived, one store nearby had a single one on display in the corner.

These things varied greatly by country.

To add to vidarh's testimony, in Portugal Apple devices were sold by Interlog, they had two offices across the two main cities Porto and Lisbon.

So no one one islands would get to see one, and on main land it required actually driving down to those shops to see them, or you would eventually see an ad on a computer magazine and eventually schedule a delivery to your place, that could take several weeks.

On top of that they were very pricey versus the competition, which was already quite expensive for average Portuguese salary.

So the only place you would actually see Apple live would be in some computer lab at the top universities.

Regarding DTP, most companies were using Atari or Amigas for it.