I had an Apple ][ in my youth, I still feel that that was the last true Apple. I do admit they did an impressive thing or two in the meantime but nothing compares to the ][
It's apparently popular to disrespect BASIC now that we have gigahertz 64-bit machines with gigabytes of RAM and terabyte solid state drives on our desktops. But when you think about what you could do on a 6502 machine with a frigging 256 byte stack... hella props for the folk that made that work.
But yeah... I think by the mid 80s, most people really just wanted to run a few games, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet. The idea computer buyers may want to write their own code was fading fast.
HyperCard had one or two warts, but it was definitely functional and you could do a lot with a small amount of effort. Also... the way you learned it seemed very exploratory. You had to learn a few basics, but after that it was hard-core experimentation and remixing. I bought an old PowerBook 160 recently explicitly to run MPW and HyperCard. Mostly to remember what the old world was like.
Imagine an alternate world where people tinkered in HyperCard and eventually the code evolved to be network-aware, and we all wrote in HyperTalk and not HTML. And then that became the web. I think Atkinson even acknowledges that this was a huge missed opportunity.
The Mac was intended to be a machine that people could write apps for, or at least that's what people said after they started distributing dev kits for it. But the way it evolved is definitely more authoritarian than anything in the Apple ][ world.