I purchased my first brand new Wintel post college in 1994, paid 1,700 or something like that for a 386-SX with a 15” CRT if memory served...
Thought it was overpriced then, and it was one of the cheapest systems I could find at the time that could do what I needed it to do.
People used to say how overpriced the original Mac was when it came out in 1984 at $2495... but if you go back and look at the ads for IBM-PCs in that same time frame, you'll find that it's selective memory.
The Mac came with a monitor, a 3.5" floppy, and the computer for that price. An IBM-PC in that same year was $1995 with one floppy, no HD, and no monitor. Add a green or amber screen monitor added $499. To make it really work you needed another Floppy which added $299. If you really wanted it to work another $2500 was necessary to add a hard drive. . . a 10 Megabyte hard drive. Now you were more than $5000. You might find it discounted a bit and could get a package deal for $4500 with one floppy and an HD. . . still a green screen 9"- 12" monitor. Color monitors were $999.
So the upshot of this was that the $2495 Mac was not so outlandish in price.
It took the introduction of the PC clones to start forcing the prices down in the PC world and even then it took several years for that to really hit. We bought one of the first PC-AT clones with a 30MB HD from one of the first non Kaypro Clone firms in SF and it still set us back $3750 in late 1984 (the same setup in an IBM-PC AT was $5900 with a green monitor - they wanted $1250 for a color monitor). . . a lot of that price was the 20MB drive and a color monitor, though. Our new software had four colors. Whoopee. A bit over a year later that same company was selling their top of the line clone for $1600. . . and then a year later they were defunct, killed by price cutting competition which was all over the place.