386SX wrote:But when the 486DX4 and all the variants came out, weren't they sell like "low/middle budget" configurations? Someone that bought the last 486s already knew they were old right?
Yup, as I said, when the Pentium 60/66 were introduced, the 486DX2-66 was still the fastest x86.
The DX4 and other derivatives were released later. You could see them as 'Celeron'/budget options, where Pentium was the high-end.
This is the model that was always used in the PC market back in the day. 8088-based PCs were sold into the early 90s, as 'budget' options.
Likewise, 286/386SX didn't really become mainstream until 1990 or so, when the 486 was already out, and 386DX had been around for years as well as high-end option.
In my experience the 386DX never really became mainstream... except until the 386DX40 was released well into the 486-era, as a budget alternative to the 486 (competing with that other budget option, the 486SX).
So basically the older models were being sold as mainstream/budget, years after new CPUs were launched.
These days it's different, where you have a single line of CPUs from low-end to high-end, and older CPUs are discontinued much faster.