I was always a little jealous of the all the colors (was it 16 or 8? I can't remember) and the fancy sound that my friend Chris's C64 had. In hi-rez mode, my Apple 2 would only do 4 colors (including black) and only simple 1-note music, no simultaneous tones.

But that 1541 drive was sooooooooo sloooooowwwwwww, compared to the Apple Disk2. The 1541 was 9600 baud daisy-chain serial, I think? Whereas the Disk2 was 8-bit parallel and like 10x faster.

I think the 1541 was way easier to access from assembly language, though. Not totally sure, never did any asm on the C64, just read a book about it back in the day....

Ah, computers were cooler back when they sucked. But the internet is cool, too, so I guess it's a toss-up in my mind. :P