The Apple IIc Has Some Blemishes
It’s hard to argue with success, but sometimes it’s instructive to take a cold, hard look at a successful product and ask how good it really is.
Take the Apple IIc, for instance. It’s certainly got a lot going for it: the Apple name, enormous numbers of school kids, school teachers and hackers circulating vast collections of software and a handsome design.
If you look a little closer, however, this smallest Apple has a number of unattractive blemishes. It has poor on-screen text legibility, requires a tangle of cords and accessory pieces to make it useful and is overly complicated to run unless you stick to one or two simple programs.
It’s a cute looking computer, however. Inside that attractive keyboard/computer housing is an old-fashioned but serviceable eight-bit computer with 128 kilobytes of random access memory (RAM) and a microprocessor compatible with other members of the Apple II series. It comes with one built-in disk drive and is small enough to fit into a briefcase. But size is misleading. The Apple IIc is by no means a portable. It has a heavy external power supply transformer and needs an external monitor. If you had separate power transformers and monitors at each location where you used it, however, you could easily carry just the computer/keyboard unit back and forth, which is not true of the larger Apple IIe.
On the fully equipped system that I tested, there were 13 cables and power cords of various sorts to attach. They made a terrible snarl on the desk that was impossible to straighten out. Six of the cables sprouted from the back of the IIc itself, with space for a seventh if I had had a plotter to connect. Mind you, this was a complete system but typical of what most users would want--the computer, monitor, external second disk drive, mouse, modem and printer.
Unlike the IIe with its easily removable cover and eight expansion slots inside for accessory circuit boards, the IIc is a closed system with no ability to expand. Thus, it cannot accept the expansion card that allows the IIe to run WordStar and other popular programs that use the CP/M operating system. Nor is it likely to be able to accept the kind of upgrades sure to come the IIe’s way next year when Apple introduces a more powerful 16-bit successor to its II series line.
The standard disk drives are strictly low-end home computer variety in this era of ever-growing data storage capacity. They store just 143,000 characters of data and can utilize only one side of the diskette at a time. That severely limits the complexity of the programs that can be written for the Apple II series, since more elaborate programs require more bytes of code on the disk. It also limits the size of data files that can be stored. Even with a second drive, the combined disk storage on the IIc is less than 40% as much as is available on a typical IBM PC or PC-compatible computer with two disk drives.
The IIc is usually sold with a 9-inch diagonal green monochrome monitor that looks wonderful until you turn it on and try to display a standard 80-character-wide line of text on it. It’s instant eyestrain trying to read it. If you stick to the enlarged mode, in which only 40 characters will fit across the screen, it is quite legible. That’s fine for games and educational programs but inadequate for word processing, spreadsheet and other work that generally require an 80-character line. (The Apple IIe displays 80-character-wide lines adequately, although not nearly as well as an IBM PC or compatible.)
There is a flat panel display available utilizing liquid crystal display (LCD) technology and measuring about 9 inches wide by 3 inches tall. It badly distorts the image in the 40-column mode but, surprisingly, does a much better job forming text in the 80-column mode than the green screen. Unfortunately, those well-formed characters are barely visible because the screen is extremely dim and has very low contrast. Considering how much better virtually every other manufacturer has done with LCD displays, Apple should hide the IIc’s screen in shame.
One delightful program that I used on the Apple IIc in the 40-column mode was The Newsroom, published by Springboard Software Inc. It uses graphic images of the various functions that go into making a newspaper page to lead children through the creation of their own paper, complete with pictures and even Old English type for the page one nameplate.
Three Possibilities
Priced at $49.95, The Newsroom is also available for IBM PC, PCjr and Commodore 64 computers and even allows the transfer of text and pictures between all those systems. A library of “clip art” pictures for use with The Newsroom is available for $29.95.
As you build a collection of software for the Apple IIc (or IIe), you encounter the complication of having three possible operating systems to contend with--ProDOS, DOS 3.3 and Pascal. The software publisher determines which operating system each individual product uses. All three operating systems store files differently, which means you must have separate data disks for each. That’s fine for hobbyists and computer students but confusing to the rest of us.
A minimal Apple IIc system consisting of the basic computer with its single built-in drive, a second disk drive (required for any serious data storage) and a monochrome monitor has a list price of $1,294.
You can get a color monitor for an extra $254. The flat panel display for the IIc has a retail price of $599. Apple’s new 1200-baud “personal modem” lists for $399.
For only $247 more than a IIc, you can buy a comparably equipped IIe system with monochrome monitor and two disk drives (a total of $1,541). The Apple IIe, with its easy expandability and more legible display, is by far the better computer and a far better value for your dollar, both for now and the future.
The Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the authors cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.
