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.
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.
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.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Apple_Lisa_MRD_Marketing_Require...
I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, like so many others, and it is what started me programming/developing/being interested in computers.
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.
Everyone loved the C64 though, so fond memories are worth something.
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)).
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).