The Apple II started shipping in volume a couple of months earlier, but they were all introduced to the US market at the same time (in fact the PET had been demonstrated publicly earlier - in January 1977 at the Hannover Fair).
A timeline claiming Commodore talked to Apple first, doesn't work. Chuck Peddle, who ended up doing the PET, was at MOS Technologies when he started planning it, and had presented it to the board at MOS. When their board rejected the idea, he was considering leaving for another job when Commodore acquired MOS and got him to stay by entering into an agreement with him to build the Pet after Peddle presented his Pet idea to Commodore.
Then, after assembling a team at Commodore to build a computer, he approached Apple (whom he knew because they were of course one of the early customers of MOS, and Peddle designed the 6502) with the intent of considering an acquisition of the company as a quick way of getting a prototype done.
There are disputes about who did what to whom in terms of rejecting the deal. What is clear is that Commodore did see it as one option of serveral to get a prototype out the door quickly, but at the same time they had already assembled their own design team before talking to Apple, as well as talked Microsoft into doing a BASIC for them (despite Gates apparently demonstrating deep disdain for the 6502 CPU). The reason for talking to Apple in the first place was explicitly that Commodore would be using the 6502 which it now owned, and so it was natural to talk to them to short circuit the development cycle.
So both Commodore (and Tandy, who started even later) are quite good demonstrations at the pace the industry was taking with or without Apple: Commodore went from nothing to a working machine in 5 months, and to mass production in about 10 months. Tandy went from nothing to presenting a machine at the West Coast Computer Faire in three months.
In terms of margins, I don't think Apple had high margins at the time. Their production volumes were tiny, and contrary to e.g. Commodore, they lacked vertical integration - Commodore stayed on the verge of collapse for years despite owning the company (MOS) that manufactured both the CPU, graphics chip, keyboards and many other critical parts of the Pet and shipping far higher volumes than Apple could dream of.
Thanks for offering what you know. I'm mainly recalling from Wozniak's book iWoz when it came out around 2007; I don't have a copy handy. On the quality of the computers, I have firsthand knowledge from 1981.
Added to clarify: the claims I'm taking are that the ][ was the first PC someone could buy and use out of the box, dating from when that happened rather than the conference it was announced at, according to Woz; it was considerably better than the competitors for the first few years, if you could afford it; and they did not much cut prices as they ramped up production (that they might've had low margins in 1977 would be consistent with what I read). Woz's book had some stories about shopping it around before deciding to sell it themselves, and its influence on competitors, that I admit to being fuzzy about. And of course personal computers would have happened without them -- I never implied otherwise.
A timeline claiming Commodore talked to Apple first, doesn't work. Chuck Peddle, who ended up doing the PET, was at MOS Technologies when he started planning it, and had presented it to the board at MOS. When their board rejected the idea, he was considering leaving for another job when Commodore acquired MOS and got him to stay by entering into an agreement with him to build the Pet after Peddle presented his Pet idea to Commodore.
Then, after assembling a team at Commodore to build a computer, he approached Apple (whom he knew because they were of course one of the early customers of MOS, and Peddle designed the 6502) with the intent of considering an acquisition of the company as a quick way of getting a prototype done.
There are disputes about who did what to whom in terms of rejecting the deal. What is clear is that Commodore did see it as one option of serveral to get a prototype out the door quickly, but at the same time they had already assembled their own design team before talking to Apple, as well as talked Microsoft into doing a BASIC for them (despite Gates apparently demonstrating deep disdain for the 6502 CPU). The reason for talking to Apple in the first place was explicitly that Commodore would be using the 6502 which it now owned, and so it was natural to talk to them to short circuit the development cycle.
So both Commodore (and Tandy, who started even later) are quite good demonstrations at the pace the industry was taking with or without Apple: Commodore went from nothing to a working machine in 5 months, and to mass production in about 10 months. Tandy went from nothing to presenting a machine at the West Coast Computer Faire in three months.
In terms of margins, I don't think Apple had high margins at the time. Their production volumes were tiny, and contrary to e.g. Commodore, they lacked vertical integration - Commodore stayed on the verge of collapse for years despite owning the company (MOS) that manufactured both the CPU, graphics chip, keyboards and many other critical parts of the Pet and shipping far higher volumes than Apple could dream of.