Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2020)

Because you we're lucky to even get 40 columns (80 with an expansion card)?

80 columns would have been borderline unreadable on the NTSC televisions they were using as displays.

Context for others: Standalone computer monitors per se did not exist at retail in 1977. The only choices were either televisions, or displays for security-camera systems such as the Sanyo VM-4209 <https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1461694/sanyo-vm-4209/>. The latter, because of its high quality and perfect size for stacking on top of the Apple next to disk drives <https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/3snpqd/i_foun...>, became the iconic Apple II monitor of the early years until purpose-built computer monitors from Amdek and others, as well as Apple's own Monitor III <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Monitor_III>, became widely available.

Sure. As a practical matter, 90% of Apple II systems were plugged into a monochrome computer monitor which did 80 column text just fine, and the other ~9% had a fancy color monitor. Nobody* used an Apple II with a TV, except in maybe the very early days.

This is why you should ignore the specs, the Apple didn't really compete with Atari/Commodore/etc. It got crushed by the IBM PC.