Apple III: Now that you've seen their first generation, take a look at our third

It's a bit spurious to assume that the third generation of anything is necessarily better than the first of something else, especially if your third version is essentially the same as your first from 1977.

And so it was with the Apple III as it was running the same CPU as both the previous Apples - the 1975-designed MOS 6502, albeit in this case the slightly faster Synertek 6502A variant.

However, it did offer more memory, accessible via paging, and the operating system in the Apple III was brand new, although it could run older Apple II software under emulation. It was also the first Apple computer to come with a built-in disk drive.

It had been designed to replace the Apple II but sold poorly, so much so that Apple ended up having to refresh its ageing Apple II line with the Apple IIe. This was not actually a bad decision, as by now the Apple II had amassed a huge library of software and add-in cards. Production of the IIe continued right through until 1993.