Performance went up and the price went down.
Count the transistors in your new machine and divide by the cost.
Hint:
A CPU has over 1,000,000 transistors,
64K of dram memory has ~70,000,
64K of sram has ~ 270,000 transistors,
Add a million or so for "glue" - modems, video cards, math chips, etc.
Lets say you bought a small system ~2,000,000 transistors. And you paid way too much - $2,000.00
That's 0.1¢ per transistor - assuming the monitor, case plastic, wires, circuit boards, assembly and shipping are all free...
Ah, but from the point of view of Intel or AMD or Motorola, you bought another chip when you already had one. Since the manufacturing cost of a single chip is zilch compared to the development cost and the capital invested in the factory, they just effectively doubled the sales price of their goods. Every time a performance enhancement convinces someone to purchase a new product, the money rolls in.
You could get into pointless arguments about whether someone was exaggerating about the price of a chip or the effect on market share, but it is a fact that sales in technology are driven by incremental enhancements in performance.
And the Pentium IV has perhaps five times the transistor count of a 486 chip, but isn't significantly larger.