Apple Pascal and FORTRAN ran under a non-DOS operating system based on UCSD P-System, which had its own disk format and included a "virtual machine" that allowed it to run on many different types of hardware.

The SoftCard was extremely popular and Microsoft's single most successful product for two years, although on the downside, it was limited to using the Apple II's GCR disk format and thus CP/M software either had to be obtained on Apple format disks or transferred via serial link from a different machine running CP/M.

The SoftCard shipped with CP/M 2.2 and a special version of MBASIC that supported a subset of Applesoft BASIC's graphics commands.

If no system disk is present, Drive 0 will spin endlessly until the user presses Reset (or Ctrl+Reset on machines with the Ctrl+Reset safety switch enabled) to enter Applesoft BASIC.

[2] Most applications that support lower-case letters can also use the ESC key as a substitute lowercase toggle if the modification is not installed.

This mesh helped reduce the electromagnetic interference emitted from the computer, keeping the machine in compliance with newly implemented FCC regulations covering microcomputers.

In these models, Apple made the necessary hardware, software and firmware changes in order to comply with standards outside of the US and Canada.

The power supply was modified to accept the local voltage, and in the European model the video output signal was changed from color NTSC to monochrome PAL by changing some jumpers on the motherboard and using a slightly different frequency crystal oscillator — an extra video card (which only worked in slot 7) was needed for color PAL graphics, since the simple tricks designer Steve Wozniak had used to generate a pseudo-NTSC signal with minimal hardware did not carry over to the more complex PAL system.

In the Japanese version of the international Apple, the character ROM and the keyboard layout were changed to allow for Katakana writing (full Kanji support was clearly beyond the capabilities of the machine), but in most other countries the international Apple was sold with an unmodified American keyboard; thus the German model still lacked the umlauts, for example, and had a QWERTY layout instead of the standard German QWERTZ.

Bell & Howell packaged the unit with optional "back packs" that offered various inputs and outputs for A/V equipment to easily interface with the II Plus.

Fielded in 1982, the Microfix system was the first tactical system using video disc (LaserDisc) map technology providing zoom and scroll over map imagery coupled with a point database of intelligence data such as order of battle, airfields, roadways, and bridges.