… limited and crazy overpriced. The first Mac was an awesome demo but not able to do much because it only had 128k; within a few years people had shoehorned that demo into much cheaper machines (even had something like Plan 9's UI for Os-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end with color graphics 68k machines against the still monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane.
Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns had great software for that too.
I did own a 286-based computer which was tremendous value in terms of compute power for the cost, much better than the minicomputer machines I was using, able to emulate the Z80 at 3 times the speed of any real Z80, etc.
The graphics sucked but as we went through EGA, VGA and then various Super VGA. In 1993 I got a 486 machine and ran Linux and X Windows and stomped both the Mac and Sun in terms of value.
> Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end
I don't know that you would call some of those (I'm familiar with the Amiga) as "low end" compared to the Mac. Same CPU, more memory (the Amiga could go up to 138MB, even then), more capacity floppy drives. 4096 color display at higher resolutions than the monochrome Mac. Better sound quality, 4 channel stereo versus monochrome.
Yeah, definitely not sure how the Amiga was low-end versus the Original Mac.
Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end with color graphics 68k machines against the still monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane.
Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns had great software for that too.