Apparently a typical PC is 1985 cost upwards of $5000. The C128 was $299. So for rich people yes it may have made sense to pay a 15x premium to get hold of tech “from the future, today”. But you could have easily had both. And for a child, both machines would be entirely obsolete by the time the child grew up and entered the workforce, so I would question how much advantage you were really buying.

The numbers I remember were closer to $1500 for the PC, and it wasn't right at the launch of the 128. It had already been out for a while.

That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.

We were definitely not rich.

$5,000 is nowhere close to accurate for a 'typical' PC of that era. In 1985 or 1986, I don't recall the exact year, my dad purchased a rather exotic machine called a Panasonic Sr. Partner, which was one of the first all-in-one portable PC compatibles on the market. It had built-in dual floppies, I think 384k of memory, a built-in monochrome screen and a built-in printer of all things.

I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.