> a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price

The original Macintosh was launched January 1984 for $2,495.

The original ST was launched June 1985 for $799.

In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

Tech was changing faster than now in those days, but even so, the ST was a radical machine. You got a lot for the money.

By September 1984 the 512kB "Fat Mac" was launched but it was more expensive: $3,195.

Yes, Commodore's contemporary Amiga was more impressive, with better graphics, better sound, better multitasking, but it was $1,285 the month after the ST. Also, a single-floppy 512kB Amiga was not much fun. (Like a single-floppy 128kB Mac!) As the ST's OS was in ROM, a single-floppy 512kB machine was actually quite usable. For both a Mac and an Amiga, you really wanted twin floppies, or better still, a hard disk.

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gedy 3 days ago | parent [-]

> In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.

	▲	lproven 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly so. I own a Mac Plus, an Atari 1040ST and an Amiga 1200, but I didn't when they were new. By 1989 I could just afford to buy myself a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310, an 8MHz 32-bit RISC computer with a 20MB hard disk... but it nothing like it existed for any price in 1984 or 1985. But I was still at school in 1984, and had to be happy with a 48K ZX Spectrum, a black-and-white portable TV as a display, and a single ZX Microdrive for 85kB of random-access storage. One of the remarkable things about both the ST and the Amiga was that they had optional add-ons that contained Apple ROM chips, and with them, they could natively boot MacOS and thus run real Mac apps. Both machines' hardware capabilities comfortably exceeded the Mac's, so they could easily run Mac stuff and run it well. Mac software was often fantastically expensive by Atari and Commodore prices, but even so, this was a very attractive option -- and even with the emulator, the result still cost substantially less than an actual Mac. Of course, longer term, Apple's pricing means that Apple is alive and well and profitable, while Commodore and Atari collapsed decades ago.