Notice all the emphasis on how the Mac would benefit from being $1500, significantly cheaper than many other machines of the era, even Apple //.
Macintosh instead debuted at $2495 — considered by many in hindsight a big mistake. The much more usable version with 512k(vs 128k) was north of $3000. This is all in 1980s dollars, too.
(IIRC the launch of Mac coincided with a spike in RAM prices.)
The theme of price points was a recurring one, although it's not clear if $1500 was really an good faith projection, or just an attempt to position internally versus the bigger Lisa project?
I had no idea that a $50 cost overrun on a disk drive pushed them up $500 to $1995! Not sure I agree with the logic there. Then it seems to have been one bad executive call from there to $2495 (thanks, Sculley). So you could argue (it's a stretch!) that the $50 drive price increase ended up driving the price up $1000.
"When combined with a few other recent splurges, it pushed us over the top, so we grudgingly accepted that the Macintosh would have to debut for $1995."
Macintosh instead debuted at $2495 — considered by many in hindsight a big mistake. The much more usable version with 512k(vs 128k) was north of $3000. This is all in 1980s dollars, too.
(IIRC the launch of Mac coincided with a spike in RAM prices.)