That often had to do with the framebuffer (read ``video card'') in them. Most of them shipped with fbs that were crap (the CG6, IIRC), and the nicer ones were prohibitively expensive. They probably cost more than the rest of the machine combined. Which is especially unfortunate when it's marketed as a workstation. I never have understood why Sun didn't just contract nVidia (or whoever was big at the time) to develop framebuffers for them. I think some of the more recent lower-end workstations have ATI chips, but I seem to remember that they were really lowballing those.