My first PC 386 was in todays money easily $5000+ (basic 2d GPU + screen)... A lot of hardware in our family was handed down to my folks, because you lost so much on selling, that it was better to keep using them as they had less demands.

386 to 486 to the first Pentium (with the bug!)... You did not upgrade in place, it was often a new system. Sure, you maybe kept your screen, keyboard etc but ... The only upgrade we had on the same MB, was a coprocessor upgrade. Remember those? Each new generation of CPU was a new motherboard. Upgrading CPUs in the same MB really became a thing only later on.

GPUs had a shelf life of barely a year. Its been 35 year but i remember TNT to TNT2 having like 9 month in between. Moving from 2D to 3D involved a constant cost as GPUs evolved fast and the latest games required latest hardware.

We have not talked about the ISA, AGP, and PCI fun ... The “bus wars”.

DOS to Windows 3.1 (and OS/2 somewhere in between) to 95 ... with software being pushing hardware, just like games did.

This is why people are spoiled with cheap PC hardware where its cheap, and easily lasts 4+ years. Even with the bad memory price and more expensive GPUs, your can stil buy a $1500 system that will last you years (with maybe some lower game settings later on ... or the catalog of 10.000s games that will easily run on a mid tier GPU).

PC hardware has become boring but extreme stable. You can run GPUs for year, switch MBs without issues while keeping large amounts of old hardware. That was NOT the 80s and 90s that i remember.

In 1990 a Scottsdale 486 w/ 4MB of Ram and a 211 MB hard drive cost $6737 (plus tax).

In 1992 a Solidtech 486 w/ 4 MB of RAM and a slightly-smaller 125 MB hard drive sold for $2195

Both advertised in Computer Shopper and you can find their catalogues(?) online.

My numbers were slightly off apparently, but is that enough to change the point?

tbh this is how i remembered that time as well. If you look at recommended system requirements for something like Max Payne (in 2001) vs Unreal Tournament 2003, everything had basically doubled