At the same time it could have served as a bridge to a successor that dropped hardware support for Apple II software and focused on utilizing the 65C816 in a purely 16-bit environment.
That might not have made any sense for Apple, but it would likely have had some appeal to a significant part of their userbase at the time.
Sixteen bit computing was
always just going to be a stopgap measure; this was something everyone knew going back to the 1970's. The 65C816 never made even a
little bit of sense as a desktop computer CPU considering how late it came out, this idea that the IIGS ever would have rated a more "serious" successor is just ridiculous. Yes, it would have made some hard-core Apple II forever nutballs happy (except those guys would never have been onboard with the "dropping support for Apple II software) if Apple had churned out a "IIGS+" of some sort with SIMM sockets/a 4x faster CPU/higher resolution graphics/whatever, but this was always a dead end.
This was ultimately the Apple II successor that outfits like schools and whatnot with big fleets of Apple IIs probably really wanted/needed, but in the end it only filled a narrow gap before even the lowest-end Macintoshes were powerful enough to run a fully software Apple II emulation anyway.
It's always rankled me a little bit when you have people trying to say the IIgs was a better machine than the Mac (the specific machine you'd compare it to would be the Mac Plus, I suppose) because it was "in color". Okay, sure, I guess it is. But
everything else* about it is worse. Maybe I'm just bitter for having to do desktop publishing on a CGA card for a few years back in the 80's, but I'm sorry, 640x200, even in color, absolutely sucks compared to square pixels in monochrome for anything "serious", and the Mac will also run rings around an unaccelerated IIgs.
(* Okay, the IIgs has a nice sound chip too.)
The IIGS is proof that the C65 wouldn't have been successful even if launched five years earlier, and to waste time designing and making prototypes of it in the early 1990s was totally bonkers and the sign of a dysfunctional company.
It is extremely weird, isn't it? In mid-80's there was definitely this trend of when the big players in the 8-bit market saw the writing was on the wall for their legacy platform they'd end up releasing one final swan song version which incorporated basically all the most popular wish-list items that users thought they wanted. Notable examples of this are, of course, the Apple IIgs, the Tandy Color Computer III... and the Commodore
128. Commodore already had the Amiga, they were dipping into the PC compatible market, the C128 was obviously intended as that "one last one for the road" for the C64 faithful. Sure, they'd keep selling these things as long as people were buying, but clearly it was for all practical purposes over... but then suddenly it wasn't again?
The only reason I can possibly think of for why they decided to strike up the band again was there was that little period in the latest 80's/early 90's where 8-bit machines that were clearly dead everywhere else in the world were briefly selling like hotcakes in lower income parts of Eastern Europe and they thought they could clean up against... uhm, a weird motely collection of Sinclair and Amstrad clones, their own C64, and the old-stock Plus/4s still leaking out of warehouses? How they might have thought that was a battle worth winning escapes logical analysis.
