Apple II
The late‑70s legend that turned bedrooms into laboratories. Beige, bold, and brimming with eight glorious expansion slots. It booted to BASIC and made an entire generation type 10 PRINT "HELLO" like it was a secret spell.
Raspberry Pi 500+
A modern, whisper‑quiet keyboard computer that stuffs a full Linux box under your fingertips. It smiles at Python, flirts with 4K displays, and sips electricity like it’s on a wellness retreat.
Looks & Feel: Beige Icon vs. Sleek Desk Ninja
Apple II: Angular charisma. Lifting the lid felt like opening a treasure chest—cards, chips, and the faint smell of warm dust. The keyboard clacked like a typewriter that had found rock ’n’ roll.
Pi 500+: Minimalist, modern, and ready for Zoom. It’s a “clean desk” enabler—no hulking tower, just a tidy keyboard with superpowers. If the Apple II is a Camaro with the hood up, the 500+ is a Tesla with the handles that hide.
Brains: 1 MHz Mojo vs. Multi‑Core Mayhem
Apple II: A ~1 MHz 6502 CPU that somehow powered spreadsheets, games, and the birth of countless careers. Performance was measured in how clever you were, not in GHz.
Pi 500+: Quad‑core, 64‑bit ARM brain running a real desktop OS. It compiles code, renders dashboards, and runs Docker without breaking a sweat. The Apple II philosophically asks “What can you do with less?”; the 500+ replies “Everything, and in a browser tab.”
Memory & Storage: Floppy Drama vs. Solid‑State Chill
Apple II: Kilobytes of RAM (yes, with a “k”) and 5.25″ floppies that whirred like tiny helicopters. Sneaker‑net was a lifestyle: “Can you bring Disk 2 tomorrow?”
Pi 500+: Gigabytes of RAM and microSD/NVMe options. No disks to flip, no drive doors to baby. Your “install” is a download; your “library” is the internet.
Graphics & Sound: CRT Poetry vs. Pixel Opera
Apple II: Color was a party trick, pixels were suggestive rather than explicit, and the built‑in speaker said BEEP with feeling. Yet, Apple II art is still art—constraints breed style.
Pi 500+: Dual modern displays, smooth video, and audio that doesn’t sound like a smoke alarm. It handles 4K cat videos, Blender tutorials, and three IDEs at once—assuming your attention span can keep up.
Expansion & I/O: Slot City vs. Peripheral Paradise
Apple II: Eight expansion slots. Pop the hood, slide in a card—disk controllers, serial cards, magic. You built your machine, literally.
Pi 500+: USB 3, Ethernet, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI(s), and GPIO for makers. Expansion has gone from “find a card at RadioShack” to “clone a GitHub repo and wire a sensor.” Hardware hacking, now with fewer solder burns.
Software: Applesoft BASIC vs. apt‑get Infinity
Apple II: Boot to BASIC. The computer immediately asked, “Well? What will you create?” The line between user and programmer was a single RUN.
Pi 500+: Full Linux desktop. Python, Node, Rust, Go—take your pick. Install a code editor, a database, an emulator, a web server, and a retro game launcher before lunch. (Then wonder where the day went.)
Networking: Modem Whispers vs. Always‑Online Everything
Apple II: If you heard the modem handshake, you were basically in the Matrix. Online meant patience and long phone cords.
Pi 500+: You’re cloud‑native out of the box. Push to Git, pull a container, SSH across the room, stream your dev logs, and update your package list while making coffee.
Learning Curve: Magazine Magic vs. Tab Overload
Apple II: Learning meant magazines, manuals, and communal aha‑moments. Constraints taught discipline.
Pi 500+: Instant documentation, courses, and libraries galore. Abundance teaches orchestration—how to pick, glue, and deploy responsibly.
Fun Factor: Joysticks & Dazzle vs. Emulate Everything
Apple II: Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, Lode Runner—joy measured in pixelated triumphs and high‑fives at school the next day.
Pi 500+: Emulate the Apple II and half of computing history on the same device. One keyboard to rule them all.
Who “Wins”?
If you crave the romance of invention—lifting a lid, counting bytes, hearing the disk drive sing—Apple II still wins hearts. It’s the machine that taught us to talk to computers.
If you crave velocity—modern tooling, instant libraries, web everything, AI doodads—Raspberry Pi 500+ wins calendars. It’s the machine that lets you ship.
Plot twist: the Pi 500+ can become an Apple II for an afternoon. Fire up an emulator, load a DOS 3.3 image, and let your modern keyboard travel back to 1979. Then, when nostalgia’s satisfied, pip install your way back to 2025 and push to prod.
Verdict:
The Apple II is the campfire where computing culture started singing.
The Raspberry Pi 500+ is the tour bus with Wi‑Fi that takes the band global.