It's an interesting story to me that Apple did not think the ][ was going to last as long as it did; thus when competitors were coming out with much cheaper machines with ASICs such as
Apple really should have started on an ASIC as soon as possible so they could stay competitive but they wasted at least two years; they had little idea back then of how hard it is to kill a successful platform. They thought the /// or the Mac was the future, and I guess the Mac was (after several near-death experiences and complete hardware rebuilds) but in retrospect Apple might have moved forward the IIgs release date a few years earlier with a transition to 32-bit late in the 1980s. (Unfortunately, the 65C816 was an even worse 24-bit computer than the 80286 was, the eZ80 is the decent 24-bit microprocessor that we didn't get until well into the 32-bit age)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Apple really should have started on an ASIC as soon as possible so they could stay competitive but they wasted at least two years; they had little idea back then of how hard it is to kill a successful platform. They thought the /// or the Mac was the future, and I guess the Mac was (after several near-death experiences and complete hardware rebuilds) but in retrospect Apple might have moved forward the IIgs release date a few years earlier with a transition to 32-bit late in the 1980s. (Unfortunately, the 65C816 was an even worse 24-bit computer than the 80286 was, the eZ80 is the decent 24-bit microprocessor that we didn't get until well into the 32-bit age)