(OK, I confess. I was a real organ nut as a kid and wanted, more than almost anything, to have a job demoing and selling electronic organs. But anyway...)
One day, we saw the owner in a back room, intensely typing on what looked like a typewriter with a T.V. on top of it. We picked up an "Apple II" brochure and left. (Eventually, as the organ business faded away, the owner built the computer business up until it became one of the most important Apple dealerships in Pasadena).
I didn't hear much more about Apple Computers until early 1981, when a shop selling Apples, and other computers (mostly CP/M stuff like Victors) opened up. Depending on who was working that day, us high school kids would come in and program it, or play "Dungeons and Dragons" type games like "Morloc's Tower". (There was one "suit" there who fancied the store as part of the big business type crowd, and hated the idea of kids playing games. This store was also just about the only place you could buy single 5 1/4" disks (for about $5 each--the rest of the world only sold them in boxes of 10 for $50). But don't try to buy a disk, or a magazine when the "suits" were around. Eventually they went out of business, or moved, or something. . .
Our school had TRS-80's and CP/M machines, but not Apples. Also I had a friend who had an Apple at home, but said "My cousin plays with it all the time, but I don't even know how to turn it on". But the Apple, unlike the TRS-80, had color graphics, a built-in speaker, and the best selection of software! All this contributed to the "mystique" that Apple computers had, at least in my mind...
This changed when I went away to college. At UCSB, we had a "Microcomputer Lab" that featured about 40 Apple II's and IIe's, a Corvus hard drive network, and a couple of AlphaSyntauri synthesizers, for the music students. There was an entry-level computer class that taught BASIC and some Pascal, but I was way beyond that by then, taking Fortran and Pascal classes. (1984 was just about the last year that the MCL was Apple II-only; they slowly got rid of them in favor of IBM-PC's and Macs).
My family eventually bought an Apple IIe in late 1984, primarily because of all the educational software. But I mostly did BASIC programming and games. We kept that Apple until mid-1992, when it was replaced by a Mac LC. From then on, that Apple spend a few days in various closets and classrooms, until I "rescued" it, along with a few others.
Programming the Apple was generally a good experience, other than the lack of an ELSE statement in regular Applesoft. (Beagle Brothers fixed that with their "Beagle Basic", though). The Apple had 16 color low-res graphics and 6 color hi-res graphics; the Apple IIe, with the memory expansion, could support a 16-color hi-res mode. However, Applesoft didn't support the new mode directly; a short machine language routine was required. Machine language was also required to get any sound from the computer (other than the Control-G "beep" or a rather low pitched buzz from toggling the speaker bit in Applesoft). Of course, with the right machine language code, simple harmonies or even rough speech could be produced.
In 1985, I joined the "Santa Barbara Apple Users Group". The Group met in a long forgotten computer store in Santa Barbara, then for a while on the UCSB campus, and later on, at the Goleta Library. We'd meet to swap programs, see software demos, and share programming tips. I lost track of that group around 1987, but I was becoming more and more interested in the Amiga by that time anyway...
The last time I used the Apple for any productivity work was in late 1991. (I think I was writing a resume or something with it).
Currently, I have an Apple IIe (unenhanced) as part of my AlphaSyntauri setup. I have another one (enhanced), set up and almost ready to go (just needs to be plugged in). Now I can finally play "Morlock's Tower" without having some wannabe "consultant" standing over me. Moksha! Nirvana!