Two more things that I think made the Apple II last:
The hardware wasn't designed as a product, but instead it was mostly, simply, what Woz wanted.
"...a lot of these features that really made the Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off at the club"
-Steve Wozniak, apple2history.org
I think the reason the Apple II hardware had such appeal, and therefore such longevity might simply be because he cared about it.
AppleWorks. I'm not even sure where to begin with this other than to say that an Apple II with AppleWorks was a complete productivity workstation and immediately useful in ways few other such systems are.
So what's my version of this?
It's certainly centered on an FPGA, possibly multiple FPGAs. I've talked about this a lot and I've been talked-out of it a lot, but I keep coming back to the idea of a machine that is truly dynamic, and right now the most dynamic piece of electronics is the FPGA.
A simple and effective bus architecture that allows for flexible expansion is (equally?) important. I don't want to jump to any conclusions here but something like i2c comes to mind unless I can find something simpler. It only needs to be as fast as it needs to be, and I'd need to do some math to figure out if i2c is fast enough, but my gut says yes.
If the bus is flexible enough what else needs to be defined before we can get started? I believe strongly in the importance of "self-hosting", the ability for a general-purpose computer to be capable of writing software for itself, so I guess the "minimum package" would be something that has enough peripherals to pull this off. Unless something changes radically that means the ability to enter code and see what it does, so some sort of keyboard and display are probably essential. Beyond that I want to be very careful about prescribing things, and even these things I might waffle on if some other path towards self-hosting reveals itself.
But what to do with it beyond write software yourself? I think something like AppleWorks is in order soon if not immediately after making such a new machine available. Fortunately I've been working on something called "Pouch" which is not entirely unlike such a "works" package. The tools it's currently composed of are designed to meet my specific needs, but I would imagine my needs are shared by others and with a little collaboration the set could be rounded-out nicely to make the new machine useful to someone while they're still learning to program it.
I'll keep pulling on this thread, maybe it will unravel something...
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026