Yeah, at the turn of the century we had a CD-RW in our family PC. Mac was always expensive; while internal CD-R for a PC would have been probably half that price? Certainly I remember CD-R and CD-RW became pretty ubiquitous pretty fast, and while the drives were pricey at first, the discs were cheap mb for mb. You could buy the discs in supermarkets pretty quickly, they took off so fast.

Even if pricy at the beginning, you also knew if you burnt a CD it'd go in any PC. And if you burnt music tracks onto it, it'd play in any Hifi or Walkman. They just hands down made way more sense than an expensive Zip Drive as they were so much more useful.