The Apple IIc introduced a unique off-white coloring known as "Fog", chosen to enhance the Snow White design style.

In terms of video, the text display added 32 unique character symbols called "MouseText" which, when placed side by side, could display simple icons, windows and menus to create a graphical user interface completely out of text, similar in concept to IBM code page 437 or PETSCII's box-drawing characters.

It also meant less of a need for slots, as the most popular peripheral add-on cards were already built-in, ready for devices to be plugged into the rear ports of the machine.

The entire Apple Disk II Card, used for controlling floppy drives, had been shrunk down into a single chip called the "IWM" which stood for Integrated Woz Machine.

The standard DE-9 joystick connector doubled as a mouse interface, compatible with the same mice used by the Lisa and early Macintosh computers.

[8] The keyboard itself was built into the front half of the case, much like a notebook computer, and early models[9] had a rubber mat placed beneath the keycaps which acted as a liquid spill guard.

[13] While noting its lack of an internal modem and inability to use expansion cards such as the popular Z-80 SoftCard, BYTE in May 1984 described the Apple IIc as a "head-to-head [competitor] with the IBM PCjr" for novice computer users.

There was no self-test diagnostic present in this ROM; holding down the solid-Apple key during cold boot merely cycled unusual patterns on screen which served no useful purpose or indication of the machine's health.

Serial ports on Apple IIc motherboards manufactured before December 1984 are 2.9% slower than the Electronic Industries Association standard, greater than the permitted plus or minus 2% variance.

Apple would swap affected motherboards for users who could prove they had an incompatible serial device (e.g. a third-party 1200-baud modem which presented problems; not all did).

The Mini-Assembler, absent since the days of the Apple II Plus, made a return, and new Monitor "Step" and "Trace" commands were added as well.

The upgrade consisted of a single chip swap (and a trivial motherboard modification), which Apple provided free only to persons who purchased a UniDisk 3.5 drive.

[24] The original Apple IIc had no expansion options and required third-party cards (e. Legend Industries) to perform various hardware tricks.

This could be done by removing the CPU and MMU chips and inserting a special board into these sockets, which then used bank switching to expand memory up to 1 Megabyte (RAM).

The new keyboard no longer had the rubber anti-spill mat and offered generally more tactile and responsive keys that felt more "clicky".

Changes included better detection of installed RAM chips, correction of a problem when using the serial modem port in terminal mode, and a bug fix for keyboard buffering.

The international versions replaced any English legends printed on the case (specifically the "keyboard" toggle switch, "Power" and "Disk Use" drive-activity labels) with graphical icons that could be universally understood.

Its main shortcoming was that it suffered from a very poor contrast and no backlighting, making it very difficult to view without a strong external light source.

A third-party company would later introduce a work-alike LCD screen called the C-Vue, which looked and functioned very much like Apple's product, albeit with a reportedly slight improvement in viewability.

Consequently, both sold poorly and had a very short market life span, making these displays fairly uncommon (and as a result, extremely rare today).

Third parties also offered external rechargeable battery units for the Apple IIc (e.g. Prairie Power Portable System available from Roger Coats)[26][27] with up to eight hours per charge or longer.

Adapter cables were sold as well that allowed the Apple IIc to plug into an automobile's DC power cigarette lighter.

It proved difficult since the IIc was a closed system that initially was designed with no expansion capabilities in mind; however, many companies figured out ingenious ways of squeezing enhancements inside the tiny case.

While sometimes a tight squeeze, this trickery worked quite well, and most importantly of all offered users a way to expand memory—something Apple did not themselves support until the Memory Expansion IIc model was introduced.

Some companies devised a method for squeezing in an entire CPU accelerator product, by means of placing all the specialized circuitry (i.e. cache and logic) into one tall chip that outright replaced the 40-pin 65C02 microprocessor, speeding up the machine from 4–10 MHz.

Applied Engineering offered an ever increasing and improved line of "Z-Ram" internal memory expansion boards, which also included a Z-80 CPU for Apple CP/M software capability.