I am an Apple fan because of the work of unsung hardware and software engineers and designers, not because of the ethos of the corporate entity or because of the fuzzy feelings evoked by the glitz. The corporate entity called Apple, in particular, was c. 1984 an absolute zoo exhibiting some of the worst business practices imaginable.
I am a big fan of what those engineers produced; I have used Macs since 1991, and today own, counting them all up, Newtons and all, some 50 discrete pieces of Apple hardware, but this does not mean that I should allow myself to be fooled by the corporate hype, or that I should welcome its occasional over-extraction of the contents of my wallet.
As for what really went on in corporate HQ in and around 1984-85, Apple's projections were for 80,000 Macintosh sales a month in 1984. Months went by during which it sold 5,000 units a month. Overall on the financial year, it did better, selling 250,000 by year end, largely owing to massive sales to wealthy American Universities like Stanford (not, you will note, to consumers). Overall in 1984, the company sold only 25% of the number of machines it had spent a fortune gearing up to produce (1,000,000 units p.a. was the target). It was, in fact, Lisa-time, only this time it was worse, as the company had no other product under development. Most of the profits in 1984-early 85 (up to 70%) still came from Apple ][ sales, and everyone knew that this particular version of retro-computing could not go on forever. The Apple ][ was largely ignored amid the advertising surrounding the Macintosh, which was geared to making the machine compete with IBM and regain market share. Steve Wozniak resigned at this time in protest that his successful creation and ][ team were being simultaneously milked and ignored by the company, while Jobs, whom he had come to distrust, was a failure who shone in glory.
Consider this: virtually the entire Macintosh team resigned after the machine went public, many being distraught at the revelation of the pricing. Having damaged their health in many cases to get the product to market, with a visionary goal of changing people's lives somehow through this revolutionary technology, they learned that Apple, Inc., proposed to screw the world instead with the product they had created. I'm with the engineers, frankly, and glad now that I can own samples of their work. And yes, I do also appreciate the sense of style that Jobs in particular gave the machine.
On the corporate level, however, it seems that Jobs either hid the commercial facts away as best he could, or else believed his own rhetoric and did not care to check the facts, but finally the facts about sales came out in meetings with the shareholders, the board got thoroughly spooked, and Jobs was ousted in April of 1985. That is what happened. Why else would Apple have booted him at this time, if the Macintosh was his moment of economic triumph?
That the company's future was in profound doubt in 1984, and that a buyer was sought, is pointed out in Michael Malone's Infinite Loop, which is not a flattering study but is at least ruthlessly honest about the goings on.
Now, I will grant that the perception that the Macintosh was egregiously priced at $2500 US/ pushing $4000 CDN in the advert, is just a perception, as is my sense that the company was screwing its customers by asking that sum for the machine. I also grant that this is what much business looks like, or would like to look like, at the best of times. As a consumer, however, I found the Macintosh's descendent, the SE, absurdly and indeed grotesquely overpriced in the later 80s, and I believe that that is why, as a consumer product, the original Macintosh itself was a commercial failure. It did nothing to eat into the ground that the cheaper IBMs had gained, or to regain the market share that the Apple ][ once had (40% of the market!), and in fact what happened after 1984 is what we now all now know: the Macintosh became a niche product with something under 10% of market share, restricted in its usage largely to schools, universities, and publishing/ graphics settings — and longsuffering zealots like me.
It was the expanded memory of the Macintosh 512 (which the engineers had allowed for secretly, though Jobs had expressly forbidden it c. 1983) and the introduction of laser printers and desktop publishing that rescued the Mac and the future of the company.
A Raskinesque $975 people's computer, then, the Macintosh was not. It's a crying shame, because the Macintosh could have been sold at least closer to that price, and subsequent events (including this consumer's walking away from an SE in 1987) might have been very different.
That, as they say, is my $.02's worth.