On the original Apple ][, the reset key was indeed just a regular key that was easy to press. On later models (the ][ plus, I think) Apple used a spring for the reset key that required a higher force to depress it. Finally, on the Apple //e, you had to press Control+Open Apple+Reset to reset the machine... but I have no idea if Franklin did anything special to the reset key on their Apple clone.
It's worth pointing out that this was very much by design. Reset on the Apple II was a warm reset. It provided the ability to break out of a hung, spinning or otherwise misbehaving program and get back to the boot-time monitor prompt in a state where your live in-memory work wasn't lost.
Remember the original computer didn't have a disk yet. The only storage was a cassette tape operating at 6000 baud. You didn't hack on it by editting a text file and then compiling it from storage, you programmed in-memory (either in BASIC or by hand-assembling instructions at the monitor). Then you tried it, and if it worked you started worrying about how to get that pickled to storage in a recoverable way.
It was a different world, and "reset" was absolutely a critical feature.
But yeah, fast forward a few years and the median user was "running" software and not writing it, and we all forgot about why it was there.
The RESET key is so well-hidden it's not even visible in the first picture. In the second picture, you can see the notch along the back of the keyboard near the numeric keypad. In the third picture, with the cover removed, you can how the key extends backward at a perpendicular angle.
You're never going to hit that thing by mistake. You might not even realize it exists until someone points it out to you.
On the first Mac, you had to attach the hardware for the reset ‘key’ yourself, if you wanted one. See photo “3 of 3” on https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma... for the part you had to insert. The two ‘prongs’ reached two switches for NMI and reset inside the Mac.
It was just ctrl-reset for the reset button. Ctrl-open apple-reset was a hard reboot. But since open apple was aliased to one of the paddle buttons, you could accidentally trigger a hard reboot if you happened to have something sitting on top of the paddles that you weren’t using.
yes, i think that the trend was to make it harder to reset, but why not simply have a reset switch? my dragon32 (6809 processor) has one on the back and the research machines 380zs (z80 processor) had an illuminated switch on the front of the steel case of the brute, which reset and dumped you into the front panel/machine-code debugger. oh, those happy days.
