The Apple's technical quality was head and shoulders above the other PCs of the epoch. It did much more with less hardware than its contemporaries like Altair, IMSAI, Osborne, Kaypro, TRS-80, Heathkit, the PET, the Atari 400, the TI-99/4, Datapoint's products, and the VT100, which contained all the hardware needed for a PC without being programmable. That's a big part of why those other smart kids' companies mostly failed: their products were uncompetitive with things like the Apple and the Commodore 64.
Woz had a serious brain injury in a plane crash in February 01981 (https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/220512), and I think that's when he lost his technical edge. Also, though, he was more interested in flying planes and organizing rock concerts at that point. You could imagine an alternate history where Apple took CPU design in-house in 01981 instead of 02011 or whenever.
Burrell Smith was using PALs in the first Macintosh prototypes in 01979, and the eventual Macintosh was built around the so-called Integrated Burrell Machine (replaced with more expensive but less risky PALs for the final design), which was critical to getting a competitive product out the door. The Apple III that year did have a custom "Integrated Woz Machine", not designed by Woz, and while its hardware design was disastrous, that was in spite of the IWM, not because of it. There was still plenty of opportunity for Woz's specialty of ultra-efficient digital logic design to provide a competitive edge.
Woz had a serious brain injury in a plane crash in February 01981 (https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/220512), and I think that's when he lost his technical edge. Also, though, he was more interested in flying planes and organizing rock concerts at that point. You could imagine an alternate history where Apple took CPU design in-house in 01981 instead of 02011 or whenever.
Burrell Smith was using PALs in the first Macintosh prototypes in 01979, and the eventual Macintosh was built around the so-called Integrated Burrell Machine (replaced with more expensive but less risky PALs for the final design), which was critical to getting a competitive product out the door. The Apple III that year did have a custom "Integrated Woz Machine", not designed by Woz, and while its hardware design was disastrous, that was in spite of the IWM, not because of it. There was still plenty of opportunity for Woz's specialty of ultra-efficient digital logic design to provide a competitive edge.