At the time, a CP/M machine was a business machine, because it could run a word processor, a spreadsheet, and dBase. (Literally the name of the database program from Ashton-Tate.) So you could buy a "serious" CP/M machine, but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine.
But if you bought an Apple II with the CP/M card, it was a business machine again.
The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and first released on the Apple II (and apparently accounted for lots of its sales) - native CP/M spreadsheets, which came along later, were frankly a bit crap.
But I agree, there was more business software on CP/M.
Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets.
I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.
> but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine
Which makes it doubly interesting that the AppleⅡ eventually shared the same fate to allow Macintosh LC systems to run old edusoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card
I purchased one in 1984 to learn CP/M and Z-80 assembly on the Apple II. Later I used it to learn Fortran and Turbo Pascal, and finally bought a PCPI Applicard to speed the things up. The Z-80 softcard could be one of the best cards in Apple II's history, IMHO.
I had that card for my Apple II (still have it in fact). It was solely to run WordStar. Once AppleWorks was released, I never booted into CP/M again. (For some reason, I never used Apple Writer. I can't recall why not.)
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard