A contender for what, though?<p>As neat as it was (I remember it fondly -- I&#x27;d love to buy one for myself now), the IIgs was a distraction and a dead end. The Apple II division had been starved for resources forever, and the IIgs was too little, too late.<p>Just viewing it from a raw computing power perspective: by 1986, it was clear that you needed more than 16-bit addressing capability by the end of the decade.