Expensive now? A Quadra 950 in 1992 had a starting price of $7200 (1992 dollars) and that didn't include any hard drive. That's almost $13000 or more than €11000 today for the basically empty base model before several thousand more to upgrade RAM and add storage.
Also Apple seems to be the first laptop producer to raise prices instead of lowering them. In 2010, I could get a MacBook for 1000 euros. The equivalent laptop upgraded to today's standards would cost 2-3 times that.
Well, first spec them comparatively though. Which includes things like same CPUs and GPUs, and the quality of the screen, the touchpad, and the casing.
High-end MS Surface laptops, for example, cost just as much (15 inch Intel Core i7-8650U CPU clocked at 1.9 GHz, a discrete Nvidia 1060 GPU with 6GB of RAM, 16GB of memory and a terabyte SSD = $3,299, 13-inch machine with an i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and an integrated Intel GPU = $1,499 ).
>In 2010, I could get a MacBook for 1000 euros. The equivalent laptop upgraded to today's standards would cost 2-3 times that.
No, it wouldn't. The MacBook was a low spec machine for students and such. The equivalent machine today would be a lowest spec 13' Macbook Pro retina, which goes for €1.499 in Germany. So 1.5 times that (though it's not exactly comparable).
The MacBook Aluminium was everything but a low spec machine (in fact, they sold it a year later as 'MacBook Pro') and I bought it for 1050 Euro new in 2009.
The plastic MacBooks were ok, but definitely not so cramped at the time as a MacBook Pro base model today. I know it's a hard disk, but the 2008 model had more storage than today's base model MacBook Pro (160GB vs 128GB).
At the time, macOS worked well on spinning platters, while having an SSD is pretty much a necessity now.
Is it? Or just what we're used to? If you go to SSD speeds, you can't easily go back.
I don't think OS X / macOS needs an SSD any more than it used to (if you boot as HFS+ volume). It will be faster with the SSD (of course) but it wont be slower with an HD than it would be back in time, just because it's HD.