[HauntingPin]

Those prices are wild. I forgot how much laptops cost at the time. On the other hand, I was just a kid, so maybe I was just never really that aware of it.

Price USD Price DM Euro

$ 1,599 DM 3749 EUR 1917

$ 1,799 DM 4249 EUR 2172

$ 1,499 DM 3999 EUR 2045

$ 1,799 DM 4699 EUR 2403

https://www.ibook-clamshell.com/index.php/en/model-overview

[SahAssar]

Yeah, that first ibook base model would have been around $3100 today ($1599 then): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook#iBook_G3_(%22Clamshell%2...

Laptops used to be a premium product, even on the lower-ish end. I don't think that properly changed in the mass-market until the eee pc, but I might be misremembering.

[Clamchop]

And Apple famously struggled for a long time to compete with PCs on price, beyond what their positioning as a premium brand would justify, compounding the problem. And their hardware wasn't exactly setting the world on fire on performance metrics, either.

I'd long thought it'd gone underappreciated how much slow but steady progress Apple has made in the past couple of decades at improving the value of their computers, but everyone has been talking about that since the Neo dropped. Well deserved and overdue, in my opinion.