The IBM PC in 1981 cost $4,500 to $8,500 in today's money. The original Mac would cost $6,000 if released today. Computers have become a great deal cheaper in the ensuing decades.
Bill Machrone, long-time editor of PC Magazine, coined a "law" that the computer you wanted always cost $5,000. Which held reasonably true for a rather long time. It broke down maybe about 10 years ago although, as with the latest Mac, you can still get to $5K without too many gymnastics for pro video work or high end gaming.
You can configure a desktop for way cheaper than that and it can run 90% of modern games. Just don't get the latest generation top of the line Nvidia/AMD card, either get the previous top of the line one or a decent mid-range one (check benchmarks when choosing).
Don't get the most expensive RAM or CPU, you lose 10% real performance but you halve your budget.
Windows is fantastically supported: Microsoft Office, Adobe suite, AAA games, Active Directory, databases, browser and browser plugins, and a thousand others.
When I was in college in the mid 2000s my senior project needed a single board computer. We spent $500 on a small PC104 board with a 100MHz National Instruments Geode (x86 compatible) process. That didn't include any RAM or storage. I really wish the Raspberry PI would have been available back then. Especially the Raspberry PI ecosystem, makes interfacing with stuff so much easier. We interfaced a small LCD I found at a surplus shop and it took us weeks to get it working. No you can buy a touch screen LCD for $30 and there are libraries to get it working in about 20 minutes.
> Computers have become a great deal cheaper in the ensuing decades.
By the way, it turns out people think "automation is replacing jobs in manufacturing" because they've misread the data showing them just how much cheaper computers have gotten since then, and therefore how much more computer one factory employee can make.
I am really curious about how anyone could afford computers at these prices in the 1980s. I guess my family was really poor then. We had a C64 and later an Amiga.
Most people couldn't. And businesses which could afford them wouldn't. Which is why Lisa bombed.
But Lisa's pricing made the Mac more appealing. It wasn't exactly affordable, but you were getting maybe a third of a Lisa - including the new GUI, which was obviously the future [tm] compared to the Apple II - at less than a third of the price.
Even at the prices being charged, the Mac and PC were competitive with previous standards, and affordable enough to have a sizeable market among affluent middle class users.
They offered more than the old S-100 boxes did, for the same or less money. And they were much cheaper and more "personal" than industrial minis like the PDP-11 and the VAX.
Fun fact: Lisa sales were much better than the projections in the marketing requirements document (MRD). However, the MRD was using a much lower price ("end user price under $5000") and now the Lisa had to bring in exploding development costs. What really bombed (or flexed) was the Apple III motherboard, resulting in Apple having to reduce its line of products – and Lisa was the first to go.
Regarding the price, mind that the Lisa came with an integrated office suite (long before the success of MS Office) and was targeted at offices and professionals (think dentists). Which rendered it a somewhat curious "workstation for office work", at least from todays perspective, where eventually office machines became the epitome of cheap, bare-bones boxes.
The MRD mentions as potential users secretaries, managers, and executives (of Furtune 1500 businesses) as well as bookkeepers in general.
They didn't unless they were well off. Only 8% of houses had a computer in 1984. 15% by the end of the decade. C64 was $595 new, if you had one I doubt your family was poor.
I bought a TS1000 in 1981 or 82 for $99, and a C64 in probably spring 1983 for $299 at Circuit City. I was in 9th grade and used paper route money to get it (parents thought they were glorified Atari 2600's). Hehe, remember newspapers and paperboys?
I'm surprised only 8%. My memory of growing up in the UK in the early 80's was that ZX81'S and ZX Spectrums were super common. I bought my ZX81 in 1982 for £50 new which looks like it was maybe $80.
One of the reasons the Spectrum was so common was the low price. And of course using taps for games meant that most weren't paid for, but copied and shared around at school.
I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, like so many others, and it is what started me programming/developing/being interested in computers.
The UK actually had the highest level of computer ownership in the world at around that point.
You're probably looking at it from a biased point of view though. When I was growing up everyone had a Snes. Of course it was just all teenage boys that had one.
There seems to be a few C64's including breadbin and C64C models on eBay most days that I look. Granted some may need recapping or other work done, but there are plenty of others in working condition or only needing minimal repairs. I think you could get one for not much more than $US200 + plus shipping.
As others have noted, individuals mostly didn't own PC clones or Macs in the early 80s and they weren't even all that common in businesses.
I did buy a dual floppy PC clone in about 1983. I don't remember how much it was--wish I still had my receipts from that far back--but it was a big purchase for me at the time. [ADDED: I probably dithered over it for something like a year, during which time it became obvious that PC clones were the future rather than the S100 etc. systems running CP/M.] Based on ads from the time, it was probably about $2500 but a printer and software would have added to that.
And when I went to business school about a year later, I was one of very few people in my class who had their own computer. (There was a small computer lab in the school--that actually had a Lisa among other things as I recall. At some point when I was there they added a bigger lab with a bunch of IBM AT clones (80286s)).
My Dad bought a 386 with a whopping 40mb Hard disk in 1991 I remember him mentioning it cost a small fortune and he could have purchased a car for the same price he paid.
I remember one of my friends had a Tandy the 386 ran rings around it (it supported vga graphics for one - I can remember playing the original Civilization game and Prince of Persia on the 386).
My first Mac (512K) and Imagewriter cost north of $5,000. I still remember paying for it with cash from anything I could sell, a cheque with the money I'd saved for months, and the rest was on my newly acquired VISA card.
When I think about that investment as a ratio to my disposable income at the time, I was crazy! But, as a retired IT Exec, things did work out in-the-end.
VGA 640x480 was 16 colors, wasn’t it? The Mac II did 256 colors at that resolution.
The software side also helped. Windows (¿mostly?) ran a fixed palette, while the Palette Manager on the Mac made it easy for applications to pick whatever color (out of 16M) they wanted.
On the hardware side, most PCs still had monochrome monitors, and even those with color monitors didn’t typically have ones as good as the Trinitrons that Macintosh IIs often had.
So are we talking about what was available or what people could actually afford? Because if it's the later, the Mac II was much more expensive than even the highest end PCs.
You're right though on the color palette. I never understood why Windows nor its applications didn't change it to something less garish than the default CGA palette.
I think we’re talking about what people saw. If you saw a Mac II, chances were quite good that it either had a Trinitron display or that monochrome vertical one.
If you saw a PC with a color monitor, chances were that monitor was moved over from a DOS machine, and dated from the 320x240 era.
EGA (640×350) came out in late 1984 and was the first reasonably decent color display on the IBM PC. Prior to that you mostly had a choice between mono text, really crappy CGA color graphics, or something proprietary like the Hercules mono graphics.
