I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.
Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.
Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.
I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).
But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.
They could have put out a cheese-grater with fresh Intel chips every year like clockwork, but they were too cool for that. And the failure is all the more striking when they continue to "crush it" in other categories.
These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.
$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.
The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)
You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.