Wasn't the Indy $15,000? Even accounting for Moore's Law it would have been hard for SGI to go mainstream.

I think you could get them for less than that by 1994, like $5,000. But then Jim Clark gave up trying to turn SGI into a mass-market company and went to go start some software company.

Contemporary fully-loaded Macs were comparable.

I don't know about that, but even so, making the cheapest SGI comparable to the most expensive Mac wasn't a recipe for mainstream success.

Well my dad bought a color Macintosh II for $9,000 so I'd say the prices were moderately comparable. It's crazy to think how expensive computers were back in the day. And $9,000 in 1980's currency is probably like buying a $18,000 computer today. With that much money, you could buy nine 1U fully decked 8-core machines today.

I think NeXT is a more apt comparison.

The irony of that is that NeXT served as the basis for Mac OS X.

Explain.