alt Hacker NewsWhen it released, it cost $595 (back then, not in today's money), considering the price dropped to just $229 the following year, that was not a good buy when it came out.
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It's one of the more popular retro-computers, but cheap to get into, there are a lot of them around: it's still always cheaper than its original sticker price! I think I paid more for the replacement power supply (the original ones haven't aged well, and have been known to fry them).
It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).
We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.
But if you pre-ordered, you got a tape drive, which was, like, a $75 value!
Not unusual in that era though, home computers were evolving ridiculously fast.
There was only 5 years between the C64 and the Amiga 500 which launched for $699 (adjusted for inflation, using https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $595 comes out to $700), it was a wild time to be into computers, I didn't start til 1987 (I was 7) and the pace of progress was crazy to grow up through.