In the early 90s, my primary school in "rural" Texas (45 minutes outside of Houston) got it's first computer lab. It had 30 Macs. Every class room had an ancient Apple (not sure what version at this point - IIe or III?).
Apple had BIG BIG discounts for education, that IBM did not. Even being a town outside of Houston, we never got Compaq PCs.
That said, once Win95 hit, EVERYTHING was swapped out for PC district wide. I remember my parents complaining that a new school tax was getting levied on our town to upgrade technology just a couple years after a previous one had already hit.
Education was the niche that kept Apple afloat back then -- they'd managed to make the Apple II the de facto standard for school computing, and when they wanted to transition schools to the Mac in the early '90s, they had to go so far as to design an Apple IIe on a card [1] to allow the Mac models they were offering to schools to remain compatible with the huge library of Apple II educational software.
They never succeeded in actually turning the Mac itself into the standard platform for school computing, and as you point out, once the Apple II platform was long in tooth, schools
began migrating in droves to Wintel boxes, and Apple's finances took a major hit.
Apple barely made it out of the '90s intact. They had a massive turnaround after Jobs returned, and are a major powerhouse today, but people forget just how marginal the Mac was in its early years.
… limited and crazy overpriced. The first Mac was an awesome demo but not able to do much because it only had 128k; within a few years people had shoehorned that demo into much cheaper machines (even had something like Plan 9's UI for Os-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end with color graphics 68k machines against the still monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane.
Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns had great software for that too.
I did own a 286-based computer which was tremendous value in terms of compute power for the cost, much better than the minicomputer machines I was using, able to emulate the Z80 at 3 times the speed of any real Z80, etc.
The graphics sucked but as we went through EGA, VGA and then various Super VGA. In 1993 I got a 486 machine and ran Linux and X Windows and stomped both the Mac and Sun in terms of value.
> Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end
I don't know that you would call some of those (I'm familiar with the Amiga) as "low end" compared to the Mac. Same CPU, more memory (the Amiga could go up to 138MB, even then), more capacity floppy drives. 4096 color display at higher resolutions than the monochrome Mac. Better sound quality, 4 channel stereo versus monochrome.
Yeah, definitely not sure how the Amiga was low-end versus the Original Mac.
It was also nonexistent within the US.