My first Mac (512K) and Imagewriter cost north of $5,000. I still remember paying for it with cash from anything I could sell, a cheque with the money I'd saved for months, and the rest was on my newly acquired VISA card.
When I think about that investment as a ratio to my disposable income at the time, I was crazy! But, as a retired IT Exec, things did work out in-the-end.
VGA 640x480 was 16 colors, wasn’t it? The Mac II did 256 colors at that resolution.
The software side also helped. Windows (¿mostly?) ran a fixed palette, while the Palette Manager on the Mac made it easy for applications to pick whatever color (out of 16M) they wanted.
On the hardware side, most PCs still had monochrome monitors, and even those with color monitors didn’t typically have ones as good as the Trinitrons that Macintosh IIs often had.
So are we talking about what was available or what people could actually afford? Because if it's the later, the Mac II was much more expensive than even the highest end PCs.
You're right though on the color palette. I never understood why Windows nor its applications didn't change it to something less garish than the default CGA palette.
I think we’re talking about what people saw. If you saw a Mac II, chances were quite good that it either had a Trinitron display or that monochrome vertical one.
If you saw a PC with a color monitor, chances were that monitor was moved over from a DOS machine, and dated from the 320x240 era.
EGA (640×350) came out in late 1984 and was the first reasonably decent color display on the IBM PC. Prior to that you mostly had a choice between mono text, really crappy CGA color graphics, or something proprietary like the Hercules mono graphics.
