Low end PC's were getting pretty affordable by then. This 1988 ad has an 8088 machine which was about $650 inclusive of a disk drive and a monochrome monitor.

https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-07_202104/page/n379/mo...

The entry-level price of a C128 was much less but if you add a disk drive and a monitor so you can use the 80 column mode you're not saving that much money. The 286 machine is a lot more computer at $1100, the 386 is twice that.

I had a hard time finding any 8088 machines advertised in Byte in 1990. To be fair Byte was aimed at the high end of the market, yet, Byte had plenty of coverage of the early 8-bitters, but I think the C-64 didn't get covered in Byte proportional to its popularity because it was late enough to the party that the IBM PC was getting mindshare.

Byte had an odd mismatch between what was getting advertised (you'd have thought Cromeco was really something, other vendors of S-100 bus machines that supported CP/M were big) and was getting written about (low-end 8-bitters got a lot more press than CP/M ever did)