I will definatly have to disagree with the part about the Vic-20. I think the only thing in its price range was the Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX81) and that machine was WAY worse than the Vic-20. At least the Vic-20 had color and graphics with capability for a disk drive and a real printer. Both came with a similar amount of RAM, and needed to be expanded. But the Sinclair had a terrible problem with the ram expander's connector. If you barely touched the computer too hard while it was on, the expander module would move and cause the computer to lock up. So the Sinclair was actually more usable WITHOUT the expander installed.. And at least the Vic-20 had a real keyboard and a joystick port!
WHAT THEY DID GET RIGHT:
The Apple III - for sure!
The emachines - OH YEAH! I used to work on these things and they had dismal failure rates on the power supplies. In fact, the computer store I worked for searched long and hard at the time to find a supplier of those little proprietary power supplies.. We finnally found one and bought up around 40 a month. Half of those we sold to customers and the other half we used ourselves to fix all the ones being brought in for repair!
Packard Bells - Oh yes.. these were crap. Actually some of them weren't too bad, the main problems were the modem/sound board combos and the crappy-ass software included on the machine.
