Are you sure of your history? The Apple I was just an assembled logic board, you had to provide the power supply, monitor, keyboard, case, et. Hardly a consumer aimed product. It was mainly meant for the computer hobbyist. Steve Wozniak wrote his own version of BASIC and it was fairly innovative for the time as I remember. Apple may have gone the direction you mention but it did not start off that way. Your argument might work for the original Mac but there was still quite a bit of good third party software for it, not sure of the quality of or existence of developer tools. I never went beyond hypercard in those days...