The Apple II was not capable of high-resolution color, with or without the 80-column card. You would have used the 80-column card with a monochrome monitor. I don't remember whether I ever used it personally.
I couldn't find any pictures of Kaypros with color screens. Was it uncommon?
Ahh, yes, the parent of your post..."The memory resources must have been tight, because the original Mac had like a 512x342 pixel display, not even enough to display a full page width of text."
My thought was, “Why didn’t the Mac have color?” and I was comparing it to color systems that had similar or better resolution than the Mac… and I think that’s only EGA, and maybe some workstations I don’t know about.
The year before, someone demonstrated a Lisa at my college, and of course I was excited by what I was reading in Byte Magazine (though it was over my head), but the early Mac was just out of my reach. The Sanyo seemed like a step above my mom's Apple II.