[Quoth]

The Mac was expensive partly due to profit margin. Intel isn't cheap. Mac and Amiga had more memory, graphics etc. Also the Mac was 1984 and Amiga was 1985. ARM based Archimedes (from Acorn) 1987? Entry level PC in 1981 was text only. CGA was rubbish. EGA only 640 x 350 @ 16 colours. The VGA only came out when the IBM PS/2 was released in 1987 (a failure for many reasons), that was SIX years after the original IBM PC in the UK (1981). The 8086/8088 was released 1978. The PS/2 was released nearly 2 years after the 80386 and the 80486 was 1989. The PC was essentially not much different to 1976 and later CP/M computers. It was grossly inferior to the 8086 based ACT Sirius 1/ Victor 9000 (800x400 graphics) in 1981, though it too used the crippled 16/8 archtecture (I forget if 8088 or 8086, but only difference was external bus).

DOS and choice of CPU held back popular computing by nearly 10 years. MS Xenix (from AT&T), then MS version of IBM OS/2 (1989) and NT 3.1 (1993) were the first "real" 16 bit then 32 bit OSes on PC platform. MS never sold Xenix to end users. Tandy more than doubled the Xenix installed base when it made TRS-Xenix the default operating system for its TRS-80 Model 16 68000-based computer in early 1983. It was only 1983 on 286 mostly 386 that there was small sales of UNIX / Xenix on PC like platforms. MS sold Xenix to the original SCO (later patent troll SCO was a different company).

So 1993 NT 3.1 was first real OS built in MS sold to the public to take advantage of the 80386 and 80486. DOS was still pseudo 16/8 bit and windows 3.x (and Win9x) were graphical shells. Linux Kernel released in 1993 too.

The 80286 was first true 16bit on a PC, but you only got some advantage running Windows 286 and full advantage using UNIX or Xenix on a 286. DOS simply used the 286, 386 & 486 in basic 8088/8086 mode, a crippled architecture that could only address memory in 64K chunks so as to make porting CP/M easy (8080 /8085 and subset of Z80 code). Intel supplied an automated translation tool.