jeeves staub

entropys said:

It does not matter how expensive macs were in the past. Heck I paid over USD$4000 for a PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” back in the day.  
What matters today is the price of a Mac compared with comparable windows machines.

What mattered most to me "back in the day," and continues to matter most to me, is the return on investment I get. And while it is less true than it was in the days of, say, Windows 3.0 or 3.1 (when ironically Macs were pooh-poohed to a far greater extent than they are now), there is no question that I get more back from my Macs than I ever did, or could, with PCs. Considering just one small part of the picture—hardware price—is a mistake.
The equation to think about is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Initial Price + Cost of Additional Hardware and Software Needed To Make It Productive - Resale Price - Value of Things Produced. For me, with a Mac the resulting number is so negative any dispute is absurd. I'm talking about many thousands of dollars per year per machine. 
Why buy one if it doesn't do that for you? This is not a religious icon, or a toy. It's a tool. A blameless, emotionless, feeling-less, even if possibly enjoyable tool.
Quibbling over hundreds of dollars of difference in price of a tool with such potential is for people who won't get past thinking small. PCs are a tool too, but (for me, anyway) it's been a TCO wash at best with those. In that case a few hundreds of dollars are significant. That lends itself to small-mindedness. If you don't mind fiddling around with your machine the way PCs demand that you do, fine—but you should be aware of how much you pay for the privilege. It's an expensive indulgence.

welshdog said:

I bought a 128k Mac via the University of Texas Apple Student program. I think I paid $2100 including an Imagewriter. I actually wasn't taking enough hours at the time to qualify for the program (had a job at the local CBS station) so I got my roommate's girlfriend to buy it for me and then I paid her.

Back in those days I worked with UT's Xerox Star. A couple of coworkers went to the '84 Olympics in L.A. and returned with a Mac. Its graphics superiority to the Star's was astonishing (not to mention its superior one-button mouse, the Finder and a few other innovations). Shortly thereafter I had a chance to win an original 128K Mac in a company contest, and made sure I did. Couldn't beat the price! How disappointing it was to find it running out of juice after 1½ pages of a MacWrite document, but I was hooked for life. There could only be one answer: move on to ever more-powerful units as they arrived.