OH? Here is what Steve Wozniak actually said about the Commodore request from the interview:
"We knew we'd sell 1,000 a month, but we couldn't afford to build them. So we sought money, and one of the first places we went to was Commodore. To the guy who had been the product marketing manager for the 6502 microprocessor that I had chosen. I had actually bought them at a show in San Francisco over the counter for $20 bills. He and his wife would hand them to us at the table. That's how we bought our first microprocessors that became the Apple I and Apple II, from this guy Chuck Peddle. He now was moving to Commodore to do a computer. We said, "We've got to show him the Apple II." So we brought him by the garage. I really respected the guy; he designed the microprocessor that I had chosen. He came to the garage and looked at the Apple II, and I put it through all its specs of bringing up quick patterns on the screen and scrolling text and playing games—all the things I'd done on it. He looked at it and didn't say too much. I figured he'd be more impressed. We later heard that Commodore turned it down.
We went in and spoke one day to Commodore's head of Engineering, Andre Sousan, and Andre told us that his boss who ran Commodore, Jack Tramiel, had basically brought in Chuck Peddle and Chuck had talked him into "No, you don't want to put all these exotic things like color into it." The truth is, he didn't know how to. No one knew how to do color cheap. There were boards out for small computers. Cromemco had a color system. You buy two boards for your Altair; each of those had more chips than the Apple II on it. So, just to add color, that's what it was like for most people. And Chuck Peddle said, "You should do it cheap. We should just have black and white; we should have the cheapest keyboard you can imagine, the smallest screen, and just keep the costs way down." They wanted to make it cheap enough to be affordable. The funny thing is that the Apple II had so few parts, it was cheaper to build and still was much more of a computer. We didn't have to include a TV set, because we assumed everyone had their own.
Livingston: Why didn't Commodore want it?
Wozniak: Good question. Andre Sousan very soon after (within weeks) left Commodore and came to Apple saying that he felt we had the right product and he wanted to be with us. They just missed the boat. I think it was that Chuck Peddle knew what he could design, but he knew that he couldn't design what the Apple II was. They should have bought it. They would have had a real good deal cheap. After that, we were still seeking money. I wasn't really seeking the money, Steve Jobs was. I mean, I almost couldn't have cared less. If I could show it off at the club and get credit for having a great computer design in my life, that's what I wanted." — Founders at work
So Steve never made a request for a specific amount of money, never even made a pitch to Commodore for money. The just showed the Apple II to the designer of the 6502 and had him present it to Commodore. Tramiel turned it down because his design engineer said it was too expensive to make... with color. Instead they got in touch with Mike Markkula, who invested $250,000 to make the first 1000 Apple IIs.
