[mschaef]

> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed

It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.

It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.

Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64

[bboreham]

The Commodore machine contemporaneous with the Apple II was the PET.

    Apple I - July 1976
    Commodore PET - January 1977
    Apple II - June 1977
    C64 - January 1982

(Dates from Wikipedia)

All four used the 6502.

[mschaef]

Apple made the II series for a long time. It was contemporaneous with the PET, but stuck around long enough to be relevant through the C64 and 128 (to the extent the 128 was relevant at all.)