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Sure. Until the flood of Taiwanese clones brought the price down the cost of a "proper" IBM-PC was high. I thought we were talking "personal computers" more broadly here though. The IBM-PC was released mid 1981...

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There were basically some toys that let you do a bit of BASIC or whatever hooked up to your 13” TV. But S-100 bus, Apple, or PC clones weren’t cheap.

They were general purpose computers. You could do BASIC or machine language and run other software on them. Lots of software developers grew up on those.

Definitely true, especially considering the original Apple II, whose base model came with 4K of RAM and didn't include a floating point BASIC.

Of course the real Apple II competitor from Sinclair was the ZX Spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

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