You could pay more than $50000 for a max spec Intel Mac Pro just a few days ago (at the risk of being outperformed by a Mac Mini). Marques Brownlee called it the most overpriced tech product currently on the market.
The Lisa and the Mac were very expensive for their day--probably at the same level as this.
The difference was that the Mac shipped with WYSIWYG editing software (MacWrite and MacPaint) that was so obviously better than anything on the IBM that it was a no brainer. People wanted them very much, but most of us simply couldn't afford them.
In addition, desktop publishing was a stupidly obvious killer app on the Macintosh (Fat Mac plus LaserWriter plus Aldus Pagemaker) and you could make your money back within a couple of jobs given how much money you would save.
That may be true, but my family only had my father working as a teacher. He got paid absolute crap for a very long time.
Even a $400 computer was a huge stretch for them. It was possibly the absolute best purchase they ever made for me as it sent me down the tech path, but they thought VERY long and hard about it.
Macintosh was somewhat cheap at release time - $2495 for graphical computer, albeit very limited in many ways. In fact, probably it's major "groundbreaking" aspect was that it was cheap - compared to nearly 10x more expensive graphical workstations used in professional settings.
A standalone Sun-2/120, with cpu, 1M of memory, 42MB hard drive, tape interface, ethernet interface and software, cost $16300 in 1984 dollars, over 45k today.
