Next products, by design, were workstations, and they were priced accordingly. They were not targeted at the normal consumer.

To give a bit of historical perspective, the Macintosh IIfx was priced at $9,869 USD for 4 MB memory & 80 MB HDD in 1990. The NeXTcube was not out of line for the class of machine it was. Also, I remember someone telling me that Adobe did charge a fair bit for their Display Postscript.

I actually think one of the biggest problems was charging so damn much for the developer tools and their retail picks were less than helpful.

I got a copy of NeXTSTEP 3.3 and 4.0 with the developer tools and had a Microway server speced to run it (90MHz Pentium). It was way more fun and productive than any other machine and that includes the BeOS which was nice but felt a bit unfinished. The manuals were amazing and I wish Apple still knew how to do documentation as well as NeXT did.

It was also the case that Jobs was reluctant to sell them to the businesses that could afford them and easily justify the cost in enhanced productivity such as investment banks. He wanted to sell them to education at a time Sun was using some of their profits from banks to sell to education at a discount. A superbly effective strategy for Sun for many years.

NeXT would have gone bust almost immediately.

I wonder what would have happened if Xerox priced Altos products at a level normal people could afford them.

He couldn't. That was always the intention, but his vision outraced the technology : cost curve.