I always wondered why the Altair 8800 was so popular / why it wasn't much different than the original $360 price of the 8080, even if it seems they didn't really make any profit on these base unit kits - only on I/O cards.
But I've just discovered, from this:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards...sta-altair.pdf
- That they managed to get cosmetic 'B-grade' 8080's, for around 1/4 of the price!
There's also a slightly-better resolution Intel 4004 Ad in that pdf, from 2018, which compares costs with modern-day price.
- Although still struggling to find a fully-readable non low-resolution copy of that advert, from Goggle image searching (Even Intel's webpage is rather low-res)