Given Apple’s current locked-down trajectory with the Mac, the Mac Pro was gonna die eventually, and it’s for the best that it does given it was reduced to little more than a massively overpriced Mac Studio grafted onto a useless PCIe backplane; a $12k grift, basically.
PCs at least are still modular and expandable; for now.
The Mac Classic was the first Mac to sell for under $1k, and the ‘LC’ acronym stood for ‘Low-cost Color,’ that said IIRC even back then there were PC clones that were cheaper than the at-the-time cheapest Macs, and that were actually expandable to boot even if they didn’t ship with better specs out the box. Also, the Mac Classic still shipped with a 68k and 1MB RAM, maxing out at 4MB. In 1990. When the 486 had been out for a year and the 386 had been out for five years, and I’m pretty sure PCs were shipping with more than 1MB RAM by then.
Even within Apple’s own lineup at the time, the original Mac LC shipped with an '020 vs. the Classic’s 68k.
Additionally IIRC the Apple IIc was sold as a cheaper variant of the Apple II line.
Being the “low cost Mac” is very different from being the cheapest option.
Though I’ll say that my one Mac purchase in the early 00’s was a few years after they switched to OSX and I bought a Macbook Pro for probably 60%+ more than the equivalent PC but it lasted me over 2X as long as any PC ever had prior. Plus the free OS upgrades that were unheard of on Windows machines at the time.