All I saw was a machine with a black-and-white screen and limited memory (128K at first, but later the 512k "Fat Mac" came out). And Apple's attitude toward casual developers (as opposed to "professionals" willing to sign all sorts of paper and pay big bucks) left me cold. (I had already been through something similar with Texas Instruments and their TI Home Computer). So, I didn't get too excited about the Mac back then.
It was pretty good for word processing, though (especially when teamed up with one of their laser printers). It was even possible to get decent sound out of the early Macs, using Deluxe Music.
A bit later, the Mac II came out. It had color, but was very expensive (about $4000 new) and heavy.
Personally, I didn't really want a Mac of my own until 1992, when the LC's came out. These Macs had color, but didn't cost a fortune like the various Mac II's did. So I bought a LC III (160 Mb hard drive, about 4 Mb of memory) in April 1993. The memory was upgraded to 8 MB in October 1994, and again to 12 Mb in January 1997.
Of course, January 1997 is also when I bought a PowerComputing Powerbase 240. It made the LC III seem very slow in comparison. (I still have the LC III, and an LC II, set up in a mini-computer lab for various purposes)