Nowadays you won't find to many desktops laying around the homes. The desktop PC's you do find are usually expensive gaming systems or workstation. T hose are systems that carry very expensive quality hardware which explains the inflated prices. Most consumer branded computers fall in line of the laptop, mainly because the market is flooded with reasonably priced laptops.
Good news, I found a pretty decent desktop computer on Micro Center for a insanely cheap price. The HP PrDesk 400 G1 desktop computer retails for $449,which by the way if your interested it has pretty decent hardware, Intel Core i5-4690S 3.2 GHz processor,8GB of RAM,Intel HD graphics 4600, 1TB hard drive. And most importantly,it runs the latest Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit.
This desktop will not run the latest graphic intense games,nor can it handle any software that requires a great deal of hardware resources. But the HP ProDesk 400 G1 is perfect use in a small business or entertain yourself by streaming videos and web surfing.
Like all desktop computers,this one in particular offers expandable options,that generally means you can add or replace a hard drive,upgrade to more memory, and even add a SSD (solid state drive).
This is a pretty nice mid-range computer reasonably priced,most important it has good hardware,not great but pretty good.