https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o321fq7O7-Q (Jump to 10:30 for Atari)
I wonder why 8-bit Atari failed against Commodore, must have been pricing?
The VIC-20 was released after the 400/800 but at half the price of the 400!
Then the failed launch of the 1200XL at the same time as the C64 at 1/4 of that price...
Jack Tramiel was a wizard of numbers! And getting people to work very hard!
The Pokey had/has its own charm. The SID is nice, but that's hardly what was selling C64s.
Anyways, you're right, pricing. My cousin had an 800XL and I had a VIC-20 and my neighbour a C64. Given a choice, I would have taken the 800XL; its specs were so much better in so many ways and damn that case design was nice. But that product line was always more expensive. If the original 400/800 had been cheaper, Atari would have owned the industry and something like the C64 never would have succeeded. From many points of view it is a superior platform (apart, from as you say, the SID).
According to Wikipedia:
"After losing $563 million in the first nine months of the year, Atari that month announced that prices would rise in January, stating that it "has no intention of participating in these suicidal price wars".[48] The 600XL and 800XL's prices in early 1984 were $50 higher than for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64,[49] and a rumor stated that the company planned to discontinue hardware and only sell software."
Warner Bros axed things and Tramiel picked up the corpse after he was pushed out of Commodore.
I own them all now :-)
http://move.rupy.se/file/reloaded_sink.jpg
Also in that picture RR-Net for instant loading of .prg and multiplayer. The Nunchuk64; an adapter for the new (S)NES Classic/Mini controllers:
It's some kind of revenge to play Super Mario Bros on the C64 with an original new NES controller from Nintendo!
I got the new transparent case too, waiting for the MechBoard64 keyboard and new Keycaps!
The VIC-2 chip also has it's upsides, even if the palette and 2-pixel-wide 4-color mode is weird; the community today is the most active and it's growing:
Edit:
Atari: "by November 1983 one toy store chain sold the 800XL for $149.97"
C64: "In June 1983 the company lowered the price to $300, and some stores sold the computer for $199."
So it wasn't price, I guess software then!?
The 800XL OS and disk system were way better. The BASIC was better, though slower. The 800 keyboard is better than C64 which is slightly better than 800XL. The reason is that although the C64 keyboard is mushy, you can type faster on it for some reason.
2 of my favuorite recent releases:
https://sarahjaneavory.itch.io/zeta-wing
https://carletonhandley.itch.io/runn-n-gunn
Does the Atari get new games?
We had some Vax 11/780s (for engineering and finance), and DEC's service technicians were instructed to collect a cashier's check at the door or walk away. I got handy with diagnostic software and a soldering iron.
In one incident, we had some Motorola VME/10 68K-based workstations that kept failing and needing things like motherboard replacements (they were not well designed). About a year after we pivoted development to the Atari STs (hey, dogfood...) Sam Tramiel asked me if we were still using the VME/10s.
"Hell no," I said, "They were pieces of junk. They're over there in a corner." I pointed to a corner where a couple of them were stacked up, gathering dust.
"Okay, we won't pay them, then," said Sam. He was grinning. I felt a little sick.
You really did not want Atari to owe you money, especially if you were a "little guy".
Thread here, if you Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emutos/posts/4067291733301377
Atari after the Warner acquisition was a hugely dysfunctional company - there are a lot of proposed alternate histories where different projects got prioritized and execution was better, that would have given them a stronger position in the computer market. As it is, they still put out some pretty cool hardware.
It didn’t ship with every unit, but any dev could easily get one, given I was able to get one as just an interested kid.
I still remember the magic of writing HBlank interrupt routines to change player-missile positions and colors to “reuse” PMs to get more than 4+4
As a result, they squandered their significant head start in the game-focused home computer market.