You infer that a $3,200 price tag is pricey. I bought my first Mac (an SE-30) back in 1990 and spent $8,000 on it which included 24-pin printer, the max available hard drive of that era, and the maximum available RAM. And that was in 1990s dollars. $3k to $4k seems a pittance in comparison to what you get for the money today in computing power.