Malone's book is notoriously biased against Apple and Jobs in particular. However, I think to what you are referring is Apple's attempt to raise capital in the face of what they perceived as failure. Keep in mind Apple was worth $1.5 billion at the end of 1984, no debt and healthy liquidity. The Mac did not hit the $5K/mo. until about July, but quickly recovered to manage over 300,000 units by 1985. Even though the Freemont factory was designed to produce 1,000,000 units/year, Apple did not lose money because it didn't, and corporate never intended it would. The fear was that 1984 was comparably one of the least profitable years in its history and for a company that was used to enormous profits, disconcerting (they earned $300 million profits in '84). Jobs took it personally that his inflated projections which no one wanted to tell him was unrealistic to begin with, failed to be met. He and Sculley cooked up several ideas to raise capital, several of which involved selling about 25% (and no more) of the company to Compaq, or GE, or ATT, among others. However, they ultimately decided not to sell any portion of Apple for risk of losing control in a leveraged buyout. They had plenty of capital and Jobs felt strongly about his plans for BigMac, which had he not been ousted, might have brought OS X to Apple during the 90s. But Apple, never sought to be bought out 100% by anyone, nor was such a proposal ever brought before the board.
Keep in mind, that CA price was for a bundle of products (Mac, Ext. FDD, ImageWriter) that cost US $3,400. Also, the equivalent IBM with 64 kB of RAM and a single 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and monitor sold at introduction for US $3,005 (almost $10,000 today). While later models sold for much less, they were not as successful. One of Jobs' strategies to make the Mac more profitable was to drop the price significantly and make up the difference in volume. Of course Sculley was not confident enough to risk that. Instead he opted for getting rid of Jobs, which created the vacuum in which Apple failed to push any clear agenda for growth.
Perhaps. But the GUI had already made its mark on the world and was not going away, everyone knew it including Bill Gates who had already announced Windows for the IBM in 1983. The expensive LaserWriter had been initiated in 1983, so Apple knew even then the promise of the Mac in business. Given the success of the Apple II well into the 90s, it is unlikely Apple would have not recovered and the Mac, or IIGS eventually taken off, even without the help of the desktop publishing industry. But there are many what-if scenarios one could explore with Apple. The fact is, Apple put more Macs into education in those early years because Jobs knew the power of seeding future computer users. Combined with an industry that saw a $10,000 investment in hardware as equal to or superior to a much more expensive printing press oriented business model ensured its success. There are lots of technologies the average consumer can't afford when first released, but if worthwhile, it will eventually become affordable thanks to mass production. The Mac is no different if artificially inflated.
The idea of a $975 Mac in 1984 is laughable. At the time the Mac was launched, Raskin's original "people's" Mac was essentially represented by the IBM PCjr, which was a dismal flop in the marketplace. Considering the cost of development (including the Lisa from which much of the Mac was derived) and the hardware necessary to support a GUI environment, there is no way the Mac could have been priced under $1,000. But it did not need to be priced over $2,000 either.
In 1987 a girlfriend in college (pre-law) took the advice of her father and put together a state-of the art IBM PC clone. It cost more than the expensive entry-level Mac II, much less the SE, but the perception was that it was more powerful, reliable and would last longer. I typed a few papers on that thing. It was a miserable experience. Ultimately both of those contemporary Macs outlived the usefulness of the PC. But even if you had money, the perception of what the Mac could do still did not sway more conservative views, particularly when confronted with established business practices. Apple's biggest problem was that it was perceived as a toy, regardless of the price.