Coming from Apple IIgs and Amiga 2000 the Mac SE addition was boring with no color and painfully slow especially with text scrolling since the BBS scene and early internet were predominantly text.
Well, 'predominantly text' wasn't exactly the Mac's party trick - back in those days my day job was sitting behind a VT220 terminal and that did scrolling text
very nicely. In the 80s, an 80x24 character-generator-based screen was the norm for purely text-based work and a fully bitmapped screen/screen mode was a luxury that hammered the CPU and drank RAM.
The Amiga, of course, technically blew
everything out of the water - and had hardware-accelerated graphics that could eat things like displaying/scrolling text on a colour bitmap screen for breakfast. It just had the bad luck to come at a time when businesses wouldn't look twice at anything that didn't run IBM PC software and Apple had secured the remaining niche in DTP, leaving the Amiga (undeservedly) as the most over-engineered games console in history.
Apple products have always been more expensive than the competition. Apple has always been first to get rid of a port/drive.
...and they've often been near failure as a result of pricing themselves out of the market, which has usually been averted by bringing out an 'affordable' option (The LC/Classic/IIsi in 1990, the iMac in 1998, and - to a certain extent - the original Mac itself c.f. the Lisa).
Apple's problem is that they come out with an innovation (Apple II, Mac, iPhone...) that justifies a premium price because, at launch,
there's nothing else like it - then, years later, they're still trying to flog the incrementally-improved version of the same product at the same, or higher, premium, except now they're up against credible competition at half the price. Its been black-and-white in the last couple of quarters' results that they're extracting more money from a static, if not shrinking pool of loyal/locked-in customers. That's not sustainable.
Yes, they've always been expensive, but they're getting
more expensive and they're getting
meaner (anybody remember when the iPad dock came with an extra PSU in the box? When your Mac came with a DVI-to-VGA dongle? When your MacBook power supply came with an extension lead? - and the charge cable, although that was because it was integral).
...and yes, they dropped ports
when they were obsolete, when there were better alternatives or when they created a new product category. Not to save a buck or to trim 1mm off the case thickness and enable bending. Not, "whups, we're going to all-USB-C, don't worry, there will probably be products that don't need dongles along in a year or three..."
