During the era of single-threaded CPUs, speed really was everything. You damn well noticed a 50% or 100% jump in CPU speed, and each new version of Windows or Photoshop reminded you how you could always use more power.
http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/157132585930/tech-backissues-during-the-era-of
The ad above is from Boot magazine, the predecessor to Maximum PC. The Nimantics Orion 8X-200 represented the state of the art for a laptop in early 1997. Just look at the power!
A 200 MHZ Pentium processor!
48 MB of RAM!
A 2.1 GB hard drive!
Laugh now if you want but this much power cost a pretty penny then. There’s no price in this particular ad but I can say with certainty that it would have been well over $3000. Just to give you an idea of prices of the time, the 486 DX2 based PC I bought in the summer of 1993 was $2999 and the Pentium II 300 MHZ PC I got Christmas 1997 was about the same price and those were desktop systems, not laptops which tended to be quite a bit more expensive.
https://steemit.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/nimantics-orion-8x-200