>Borlands tools were mostly used by business professionals. Sure they sold at discount to students/ hobbyists etc but professionals were the core of their market. It wasn't cheap software.
No, the early Borland of 1980s was the opposite of what you describe.
Borland Turbo C with the lower price of $99 was also advertised to hobbyists compared to competitors such as Microsoft Professional C Compiler costing $299. (E.g. https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1987-05-12/mode/2up) ; Microsoft responded to Turbo C's pricing with lower-end products such as "Microsoft Quick C".
It's the later years of Borland trying to go up-market with more expensive "enterprisey" products such as Interbase and subsequently Embarcadero, etc.
The main reason Borland didn't create much software for Macintosh was that they were a small company and didn't have the manpower to build tools for the tiny Apple customer base.
And qualifying the mac market as “for home use” is pretty wild, during Borland’s heydays design houses were pretty much mac only unless they needed SGI’s prowess. Borland had started tripping over its own feet before Photoshop was even ported to Microsoft.
Photoshop 1.0 was 75% pascal by LOC incidentally (the rest was 68k assembly).
Before 2005 I only ever saw Macs in offices, studios and universities. There was one guy I knew had a Mac at home, but he was a designer. For context, I'm in EU.
One of my first jobs was working with printing/scanning software and my company would install Macs in some large enterprises because of AppleTalk's printer sharing capabilities.
In late 2001 (in the US) I switched off of desktop Linux to a used iBook G3, and have never really went back.
We were a small company and I switched to using that iBook for some work (C++ development for *nix-based systems). I felt I was an early adopter there by a few years. I converted my workstation (which for reasons was way more powerful than the ones the rest of the development group had) into a build server and a local RedHat/Debian cache for the team. That poor iBook did not have the horsepower to build the software locally in a reasonable amount of time :-)
Apple basically created their own retail stores to accelerate their consumer sales channel, and the first one in the EU was in 2004.
Before 2000 that was also my experience (I was in the EU then too). Between 2000-2005 there was a steady increase of iBook/Powerbook owners thanks to being the only laptop with a reasonable battery that could run a Unix.
Design software for Wintel and DOS was actually pretty good around 1993-1994 time frame. Aldus PageMaker for PC was released in 1991 and QuarkXPress in 1992.
No, the early Borland of 1980s was the opposite of what you describe.
Borland marketed to the hobbyists and ran ads for Turbo Pascal in hobby computer magazines like BYTE and PC MAGAZINE with low pricing of $49. E.g. : https://blog.marcocantu.com/images/forblog/turboad.png
Borland Turbo C with the lower price of $99 was also advertised to hobbyists compared to competitors such as Microsoft Professional C Compiler costing $299. (E.g. https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1987-05-12/mode/2up) ; Microsoft responded to Turbo C's pricing with lower-end products such as "Microsoft Quick C".
It's the later years of Borland trying to go up-market with more expensive "enterprisey" products such as Interbase and subsequently Embarcadero, etc.
The main reason Borland didn't create much software for Macintosh was that they were a small company and didn't have the manpower to build tools for the tiny Apple customer base.