11 ms·
Cost of iPhone X in 1957
- nielsbot 9y agoWhy 1957?
- mrb 9y agoIt's where the historical data of memory prices start on his source: http://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm http://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
- nielsbot 9y agothanks.
- danso 9y ago> Consider the 256 GB memory iPhone X: Implemented in vacuum tubes in 1957, the transistors in an iPhoneX alone would have [cost]... Did a search for computer history and 1957 and came up with this: http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1957/ http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1957/ ...the creation of FORTRAN? Looking at the entry for 1956, the site lists MIT creating the TX-0, the "first general-purpose programmable computer built with transistors", and IBM's shipment of "RAMAC", the first computer based on "The new technology of the hard disk drive".
- superasn 9y agoSo that Steve jobs was at least 2 years old before he came up with the idea
- aren55555 9y agoIn the mid 50s silicon transistors started to replace vacuum tubes. I assume tubes were at their cheapest in the late 50s. I'm not sure why the article uses '57 in particular though.
- colejohnson66 9y agoIt’s exactly 60 years ago
- pavement 9y agotl;dr USD $150 trillion.
- captn3m0 9y agoTrying to answer the following might be fun as well: How much is a 1000 USD from today in that era in terms of purchasing power? What could you have bought with the equivalent amount of money, and how many people could have afforded the iPhone equivalent then?
- outericky 9y agoa 14 inch TV. Or tuition at harvard...
- oceanswave 9y ago1000 2017 dollars isn't equivalent to 1000 1957 dollars
- outericky 9y agoTrue. My bad :)
- oceanswave 9y agoAccording to saving.org, 111.42. According to http://www.earlytelevision.org/color.html http://www.earlytelevision.org/color.html a 21" color tv in 1955 was $755 1955 dollars... or more than 6 iPhones. This site seems to have more prices of goods http://fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1957/ http://fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1957/ A cheap ford car was $1879 or 17 iPhones. Kinda holds as a cheap ford today is around 14k
- 9y ago
- userbinator 9y ago...and yet, even with all this computing power, simple tasks like loading a webpage full of text still take ridiculously long times. Maybe not with a '57 vacuum tube (transistors actually existed at the time already) computer, but then there's this: https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualC... The massive increase in computing power has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in complexity. For better or worse.
- outericky 9y agoFault of the the webpage or the phone? multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....
- Cyph0n 9y ago> Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. It was also pretty bad with a 56k modem as far as I remember -- definitely not minutes though! The wait becomes worse when the JPEG is of a... critical nature, if you know what I mean.
- eecc 9y agoThose days Goatse trolling was much more satisfying... shame that progressive jpeg rendering ruined the party
- feelin_googley 9y ago"Fault of the webpage or the phone." Webpage. But this problem applies equally to local software. I believe there was a name for it but I cannot recall the term. The idea is that as hardware gets faster, software developers add bloat^W features so that the user always experiences the same speed. "Speed" mean something like the time taken to perform some routine user task. Microsoft has been usurping user resources like this since at least the 1990's. They always had the new hardware before it hit the market. New software was tested on new hardware that no consumer yet had. By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed. If the user ran the old version on new hardware, they might see a speed increase. But the company makes it very difficult to do this and/or wages a relentless marketing campaign to convince users to try the new version and ditch the old one. The new software version did the same basic tasks the older version did, but because of the bloat^W features the speed was not any faster for the user. Not to mention how the new version would usurp gains in storage space and RAM as well. Incidentally, regarding downloading images over dialup, didnt you abort unwanted images before they completed? I recall images rendered slowly line by line across the screen. And I remember bandwidth being too slow even on a corporate network to blindly batch download images and then delete the unwanted ones. It was more efficient to view each one as it was downloading and abort if unwanted.
- kimmy13 9y agothis article is just made to justify the phone's price.
- Gibbon1 9y agoEconomists like deLong are obsessed with the idea of ever increasing growth to justify the assault on the lifestyle of working class people. A 1957 US middle class family with a sole bread winner (union job) makes for a very uncomfortable comparison with 2017. Thus the need to focus attention on products and technologies that weren't very advanced 60 years ago. Frankly though modern houses, automobiles, indoor plumbing, central heat, washing machines, vaccines, 50's era medicine, were a vastly larger jump in living standards than smart phones.
- scarface74 9y agoIn a free market, there doesn't need to be a "justification" for the price of anything. The price is what someone is willing to pay.
- musage 9y agoThen that justification for the price is the justification for being willing to pay that price; same thing. Also, "free market" is kind of a joke as a mantra. For example, "without interference" kind of would require a whole lot of marketing people stopping what they're doing. As it is now, many companies themselves are doing their best to interfere with the decisions of consumers and workers, in some cases even get in bed with each other and wage outright war on those they extract money from; so that's not a free market by a long shot.
- Gibbon1 9y agoI use the phrase 'Potemkin Markets' to describe a lot of this stuff.
- musage 9y agoIn a way I love that this comment is greyed out. It's the only one that has merit. Think of it: how often do you see articles of this kind on HN, that could be written in the thousands easily, all of which you could call "amusing" or "interesting" with just as much merit? For me personally the answer is "not that I can remember", so yeah, it's kind of obvious. HN, do you want to be a meeting point for minds, or a marketing tentacle connection node?
- csours 9y agoThings that haven't improved exponentially since 1957: Batteries Cars Houses People Dishwashers TVs Things that have improved exponentially since 1957: Disk drives Integrated Circuits RAM
- desertrider 9y agoI would say TVs have. Color, size, brightness, efficiency and resolution are all orders of magnitude higher.
- csours 9y agoThey're better, but only in a linear way, not exponentially.
- dredmorbius 9y agoWhat's your unit of measurement? How about data bitrate? Total number of available channels? Even goosing those, you're not looking at exponential rates of increase.
- tdbgamer 9y agoHonestly, who cares. A ton of modern inventions would've cost way more money in 1956. I'm not gonna go to the store and say, wow this microwave would've cost millions in the 50s, that's a super reasonable price. Compare 2017 phone prices to other 2017 phones.
- aplummer 9y agoI think it is interesting, particularly how GDP changes and quality of life indexes don't reflect things like this. Our quality of life in the first world changes for the better somewhat, but we had 150 trillion dollar equivalent devices we carry around? I also think one of the comments is interesting, that indoor plumbing is so cheap but provides such an insanely greater improvement to QoL.
- sumedh 9y ago> Honestly, who cares. It is a little but amusing and gives some perspective.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoIt impresses the shit out of me that I can now walk around with a processor in my pocket that outperforms the leading Super Computer when I was coming up, The Cray 2, by several hundred times.
- duhast 9y agoComparisons like that always assume the that price is constant with increased demand even when world GDP is spent on something. What would likely happen is first the price would go up and later down as the world manufacturing would shift to vacuum tubes production.
- Houshalter 9y agoYes if a government started buying trillions of vacuum tubes, companies would quickly get much more efficient at producing then and there would be a huge investment into researching alternatives. But that brings up the question, what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster?
- ohquu 9y agoIt's vacuum tubes, right?
- colejohnson66 9y ago> But that brings up the question, what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster? As an American, I’d say internet deployment and infrastructure upgrades, but multiple government entities have tried that and the ISPs end up doing nothing.
- ktRolster 9y agoIt's worth investigating what Utah did, they have some nice internet. http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3062258&itype=CMSID http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3062258&itype=CMSID (their internet has improved since that article, too). Those lucky people have multiple high speed providers. It seems to be something that's easier to do at a local level.
- oliveshell 9y agoNuclear fusion.
- 9y ago
- madengr 9y agoThough I doubt an iPhone could do all the processing those SAGE computers did, despite being infinitely more powerful as a general purpose CPU.
- Houshalter 9y agoThe comparison is a bit unfair because the technology of 1957 was primarily analog. A few rolls of film can store the same HD videos as an iPhone for instance. Video phones existed in the 1960s and just didn't catch on. It's sort of an apples and oranges comparison. Obviously there are many things that couldn't be done with analog tech. But it's not as bad as you would expect with just naive comparisons based on the cost of vacuum tubes.
- justonepost 9y agoI bet you're fun at parties.
- tbabb 9y agoThis comment is always more annoying than any comment that prompts it.
- DigitalJack 9y ago24 MHz? I can’t make that work with a simple typo...
- CorvusCrypto 9y agothe original benchmarks the author likely used had a screenshot of some benchmark tool's output. It showed a 24 MHz processing speed which I also thought was weird. Could just be an anomaly in the benchmark tool. Either way the tool they used (geekbench) apparently looks into chip-specific optimizations for tests and the rest of their process is not disclosed so it's possible all of their benchmarks are non-uniform (again based on an optimization ticket here: http://support.primatelabs.com/discussions/geekbench/18305-optimize-for-a11-gpus-new-architecture http://support.primatelabs.com/discussions/geekbench/18305-o...)
- djrogers 9y agoThat came from geekbench, and the geekbench folks have already said they can’t determine the MHz of an A11 yet.
- morganvachon 9y agoMaybe not a simple typo, but with two errors it's plausible. The iPhone X's A11 CPU is supposedly slightly faster than the A10, which is 2.3 GHz. So, place a decimal between the 2 and the 4, and change the M to a G, and you have a reasonable figure.
- deepnotderp 9y agoIt's unfair to point to one exponentially increasing technology and use that as an index for general technology. On the other hand, it's interesting they choose to use the semiconductor industry as their example because progress is slowing in the semi industry due to the laws of physics with respect to standard CMOS and innovative rescues in either architectural form or through novel device physics are very unlikely due to industry's glacial pace and apparent allergies to innovation. A field that scorns young entrants is bound to die someday.
- pg314 9y ago> glacial pace and apparent allergies to innovation Glacial pace? It followed an exponential, doubling the number of transistors every 10 months for 40 years. You would be hard-pressed to come up with another field with the same pace of innovation and progress. The amount of innovation they had to come up with to sustain that, is staggering. > A field that scorns young entrants is bound to die someday. What nonsense. Who will produce your chips then?
- deepnotderp 9y ago> Glacial pace? Try to make a chip, you'll quickly realize that your challenges will be primarily non technical in nature. It wasn't always this way, the semi industry was once incredibly innovative and open to new ideas, and that helped drive exponential progress. >Who will produce your chips then? I meant "die" to mean stagnate as the common euphemism in tech.
- pg314 9y ago> Try to make a chip, you'll quickly realize that your challenges will be primarily non technical in nature. I studied microelectronics. I am aware of the technical challenges. Can you explain those challenges that are primarily non-technical? > It wasn't always this way, the semi industry was once incredibly innovative and open to new ideas, and that helped drive exponential progress. Things like Silicon-on-insulator, high-k dielectrics, finfets, extreme ultraviolet lithography are not innovative or new ideas?
- ajross 9y agoMLC flash stores more than one bit per transistor. Otherwise the numbers seem sound.
- IncRnd 9y agoWell, okay. But the monopoly would have also kept costs down. Yes - all iPhones would have looked identical, but everyone would have had one! Another plus - the software stack would have been far smaller. You wouldn't need a 32 Gig phone just to install some apps. All processing would have been done in the cloud, on the mainframe. The apps would all have been dumb and only screen viewers for the mainframe. :)
- snambi 9y agoIn 2057 iPhone X would have cost may be 99c?
- c3534l 9y agoFor 150 trillion you could research how to make a smaller and cheaper transistor.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- guelo 9y agoIs the point supposed to be that the iphone x is not expensive? If so it's a dumb point. Moore's law is exponential, news at 11.
- ddmma 9y agoAmazing prediction... A11 bionic chip then was alien science fiction and might be considered privacy issue in real life considerations such as rise of communists or power consumption issues. Still is not an argument on Apple X high price.. I like more Raspbbery Pi analogy
- abtinf 9y agoOfftopic: The second of the three pictures at the bottom of the post, the one with the big yellow circle monitor looking thing, is a radar monitoring station. It was meant for long shifts, requiring dedicated attention from a soldier. In support of that purpose, it has a built in cigarette lighter and ash tray. The picture is from the Computer History Museum. Well worth a visit. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SAGE_Weapons_Director_Console_at_the_Computer_History_Museum.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SAGE_Weapons_Directo...
- t0mek 9y agoOther quite interesting item in this museum is a former ballistic missile [1] that after its retirement started an academia career as an university, general-purpose computer [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/108786967@N03/29376655486 https://www.flickr.com/photos/108786967@N03/29376655486
- abecedarius 9y agoIf I'm reading http://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm http://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm right, core memory in 1960 cost about $0.60/bit (with ~10 microsecond cycle time). It does list an only slightly faster transistor memory for 1957, maybe for use in the CPU? I'm guessing these are historical prices, not inflation-adjusted.
- nopinsight 9y agoHaving a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. Unless a killer application needs a billion transistors, the value created over a previous iPhone is incremental. I think a better way to measure value is invention's cost effectiveness = price / (time * improvement to well-being) The denominator is how much the invention makes our life better as measured by (the amount of time * the extent it helps). By this measure, smartphones are not bad but probably lose out to the Internet, washing machines, and air conditioners/heaters in hot/cold climate. Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious.
- dwaltrip 9y ago> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. I think this is far more difficult to evaluate than your comment admits. More transistors -> more software that can do more things, written by developers with a wider range of skills, in a society with increased tech permeation, and so on...
- julian_1 9y agoI don't think that's entirely clear. At least for cpus, less transistors in practice means you get rid of super-scalar architectures, and over-engineered microcode decoding and branch-prediction units. This leads to a modest reduction in processing speed with far larger gains in battery life for mobile devices (think X86 versus Arm). Client side applications are mostly unaffected in terms of end-user functionality.
- Retric 9y agoFirst change is smaller cache, then fewer cores. Pentium 4 Willamett had 44 million transistors and a long pipeline etc. 8 core Ryzen on the other hand is 4,800 million.
- Retric 9y ago
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThe factor that many seem to have overlooked with the $1000 price of the iPhone X is that, if it proves successful, it sets a precedence for future smartphones. The spec improvements of the iPhone X do not line up with the accompanying price increase. Even by iPhone standards it's an expensive device. If you justify the price increases you're just telling Apple you're prepared to be short changed when the iPhone X's successor comes out.
- frou_dh 9y agoThe name X (10) kinda reinforces this. As in, "Don't expect next year's standard priced iPhone (nominally the 9) to be as good as this."
- ZenoArrow 9y agoYou misunderstand. The iPhone X is the new flagship line. Next year there's most likely to be an iPhone 9 and an iPhone X2, though considering Apple's naming strategy it'll probably be called something like 'the new iPhone X'.
- frou_dh 9y agoThey pronounce it "ten" so you expect them to say "ten-two", or "the new iPhone ten" year after year?
- ZenoArrow 9y agoMy point wasn't about the name but about the new product line. iPhone X is a new product line. Apple have made fundamental changes to the user interface. The iPhone 9 would be the successor to the iPhone 8. Whatever name Apple comes up with for iPhone X's successor, it's almost certain to keep the new 'all screen' interface.
- frou_dh 9y agoWell I'm sure it's Apple's intention to not give up a super fat margin after establishing it. It remains to be seen whether in the medium term the market would keep its enthusiasm for a "legacy" iPhone range which becomes implicitly old and busted in the shadow of the "real" iPhone and competitor products.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI keep seeing these economic treatments of "how much progress has accelerated" (and have been seeing them for some 30-40 years now myself), and ... I'm starting to feel a case of three-card monty or the travelling dime problem -- keep moving the pieces quickly enough so that the audience^Wmarks don't spot the trick. First off: yes, absolutely, the cost of provisioning and operating electronic memory data storage and processing has fallen phenomenally. DeLong makes that point abundantly clear: in 1957, the transistors in an iPhoneX alone would have ... cost 150 trillion of today's dollars: one and a half times today's global annual product ... taken up a hundred-story square building 300 meters high, and 3 kilometers long and wide ... drawn 150 terawatts of power—30 times the world's current generating capacity But let's look at those comparisons right there. The iPhone X costs $1,000, and for easy math I'll assume all of that is the memory storage (this is wrong, but it's not horribly wrong, on an orders-of-magnitude basis). If the 1950 cost was $150 trillion, then the price has fallen by at least 150 billion fold. (And in fact it's fallen more, because there's more than just memory in the device, so my easy math understates the case.) Global GDP in 1955, or more accurate, GWP, was $5.4 billion. As of 2016 it was about $80 billion, or, just for round numbers, lets call that $5 billion and $100 billion.[1] The multiplier is a factor of 20. Which, if I check maths, is somewhat less than 150 billion. Which is to say that whatever's been strapping white lightning to our capacity to chunk out memory circuits has not been strapped to the global economy as a whole. Measures of the total built environment are difficult to come by, and even proxies for that seem at best obscure. Since DeLong specifies the idea of a 100-story-tall building, though, there is at least one interesting statistic that can be readily produced. Up until 1970, there was precisely one such building, and it was the Empire State Building, which held that record from 1931 until 1972 (at which time the newly completed World Trade Centers in New York City claimed the crown). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world%27s_tallest_buildings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world%27s_tal... Naturally, there's been some contention for that prize since. A total of four additional tallest structures are listed: the Sears Tower (completed in 1974), Patronas Towers, Taipei 101, and Burje Khalifa. If we look at the list of the world's tallest buildings, and use the ESB's 381 meter height as a minimum qualification, there are by my count 37 such structures. Again, this seems slightly less than 150 billion.[2] Finally, energy consumption. In 1955, this was, roughly, 100 exajoule. In 2017 this is, roughly, 500 exajoule. The multiplier would be then ... 5. A number somewhat less than 150 billion.[3] The question which arises out of this is what is it about information technology that allows for a 150-billion-plus increase in capabilities, whilst total GWP (20x), skyscrapers (37x), and energy (5x) have seen far, far, far less expansion? There's another question which asks if we're actually including full costs, which I'll note but leave off the table for this discussion.[4] But the question I would like to ask is what additional service value is being provided for all that the iPhone offers? Consider that it is, ultimately, an information delivery device. And that the information end-consumer, the human tethered to it, has an almost ludicrously low consumption capability. Sure, you can deliver gigabytes or terabytes of source data to a human, but the amount of that which is absorbed, over the course of a day, amounts to ... a few megabytes, at most. And we're talking single digit values here.[5] What the iPhone can deliver is video, audio, images, and text. Through on a viewport roughly the size of a 3x5 index card. The equivalent 1955 technologies it replaces are a notebook, a telephone (and probably some form of answering service or secretarial pool), the not-yet-invented transistor radio, a deck of cards or pocket game, a newspaper and/or magazine, a paperback book, a letter. A pile of index cards itself.[6] And ... the iPhone X carries any number of unintended consequences: the loss of liberal democracy, undermining a century-old tradition of advertising + subscriber based print media, journalism, adtech, concentration, possibly an entire generation.[7] Unintended consequences are a real bitch. Delong's calculus is exceptionally insufficient. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Wikipedia. Which, coincidentally, is citing one Bradforth DeLong as its source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings 3. Gail Tverberg, after Vaclav Smil and BP: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumpti... 4. Much of this revolves around the question of natural capital accounting. The good news is that this is entering mainstream economics, see the World Bank for example. The bad news is that it's still improperly founded. Steve Keen's work on energy in production functions is also of interest, though that admits yet another factor. 5. Consider audio. The human limit of perception is roughly 20 impules per second, a/k/a 20 Hz, which is the threshold at which beats become a tone. Given 86,400 seconds/day, at 20x, we've got 1.7 million bits of data, or 216 KB of audio-encoded pulses. For printed material, a 250 words/min reading pace is fairly typical, which works out to 2.16 MB/day, sustained for 24 hours. 6. a/k/a the Hipster PDA: http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-... 7. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...
- la_fayette 9y agothis is a nice approach. would it be possible to factor environmental costs into this calculation?
- code_duck 9y agoThis comparison seems fairly fantastical and irrelevant. Something from within the history of consumer electronics would be more useful to consider, in my opinion. For example, in 1982, the wildly popular low-end home entertainment computer, the Commodore 64, was released at $595, or about $1500 after inflation adjustment. On release in 1977, the Apple II was $1298, or over $5000 in today's terms. You could pay $400 per 4k of ram, so $6000 if you wanted one with 12k ram. If the iPhone X came out in 1985 for this price, it would have been $400 in 1982 dollars, or 40% of the C64 - with over 4 million times the storage capacity, to say nothing of the other capabilities. That our modern mobile devices are popularly called 'phones' misses the point that they are used as general purpose computing devices, not primarily phones or even necessarily primarily for communication. They are also GPS navigators, cameras, calculators, recipe files, photo albums, alarm clocks, book readers, walkmans, home stereos, encyclopedias, wallets, and a lot more. People used to frequently pay decent sums to buy dedicated devices to perform many of those services.
- quuquuquu 9y agoWhat I think is also important to consider is median income and net worth of US citizens at that time. In the early 50s, much pf Europe and Asia was still rebuilding from war, and the US held an effective monopoly on multiple industries. From the data I could find for 1952 in the US, a house was 5 years of income and a new car was half a year's income. For many people in the US today, a new car (post tax dollars) is either completely unattainable (multiple years of income) or a complete joke (one month's income). The numbers are different for 1982, but still closer to the 1952 US situation than today's 2017 situation. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that $1,000 for a phone is still fabulously expensive for 99.3% of the world today who aren't millionares. EDIT : Thank you for your insight :) I am thinking that maybe I am just very different from most consumers, or that our definition of "afford" is very hazy. I am writing to you either from my $50 cracked screen wifi only iphone 5c, or my $40 2009 lenovo thinkpad running lubuntu. What is strange to me is that I'm not buying this because I am price sensitive, but rather because "it is enough for what I want to do". I have a hard time believing that a large percentage of the US market will buy an iphone X. Or if they are buying it, then they don't fit my definition of "affording it". Here's why: Just 36.8% of US adults have a networth of over 100k. That means 63% of US adults would be spending more than 1% on a mobile computer (phone) that is not very much different from a $300 phone. How many of these users will Apple capture? Additionally, many people's net worth in the USA is tied up in real estate or retirement accounts. So these funds are not available to be spent, and it manifests itself in the following stat: In 2016, 63% of Americans said they could not come up with $500 to cover an emergency purchase. So, tons of americans can't even afford basic expenses, let alone luxury phones. That is why I feel this is a millionaire's phone only.
- bhouston 9y agoThe last image is from the TV series Time Tunnel. The TV show featured a decommission SAGE computer as a major prop: http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/scifi/Tunnel/ http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/scifi/Tunnel/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
- k__ 9y agoI guess I'll get a note 8 then.
- oliver2u 9y agoit should be $300 to $500.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drjackyll 9y agoComparison is inaccurate. iPhoneX has 256GB of Flash, not RAM. Vacuum tubes were used for RAM, while smaller and cheaper ferrite cores were used for permanent storage.
- amelius 9y agoI think this post unnecessarily contributes to the overhyping of the iPhone. It could just as well be written for any other brand of phone.
- thinbeige 9y agoExpected a figure after inflation adjustment and not a calculation of the parts' cost at that time. Still interesting.
- dmichulke 9y agoThis flies directly into the face of mainstream economists who claim that deflation is killing an economy and therefore requires positive inflation because otherwise "people would stop spending". Here's the thing: Deflation got people spending money on an iPhone.
- logicallee 9y agoFor the punchline, the author should have followed up: >taken up 100 billion square meters of floor space that is (with a three-meter ceiling height per floor): a hundred-story square building 300 meters high, and 3 kilometers long and wide by saying, "Oh and by the way this device has an edge to edge display that is so real you can hold it up seamlessly against a background while it invents a made-up image and draws it on, pretending it's part of reality.[1] It knows its position and can adjust to your movements. It also includes a photography studio that makes billboard-size full-color photos. It fits in your pocket and needs to have its battery recharged once per day. Also it's an entire telephone including video which it has a camera facing the front for. And you can talk to it, it has a built-in assistant. Basically, magic." [1] https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59b8/247c/b22e/38e2/0300/0549/original/ARKit_gif.gif?1505240185 https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59b8/247c/b22e/38e2/0...
- thomasthomas 9y agothese comparisons are fine and fun. but a single iphone isnt that valuable if youre the only person on all the different networks an iphone gives you access to
- nabla9 9y agoTwo data points is not enough to figure if technological progress is slowing down.
- gwern 9y agohttp://pcdb.santafe.edu/ http://pcdb.santafe.edu/
- teilo 9y agoNow include the failure rate of electron tubes, and the literal bugs that would gum up the works, and this theoretical machine becomes impossible even ignoring the power consumption.
- majewsky 9y ago> becomes impossible I salute your high barrier of impossibility.
- jdhzzz 9y agofrom Paul Graham's Essay "Mind the Gap" http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Another approach would be to ask, if you were going back to the year x in a time machine, how much would you have to spend on trade goods to make your fortune? For example, if you were going back to 1970 it would certainly be less than $500, because the processing power you can get for $500 today would have been worth at least $150 million in 1970. The function goes asymptotic fairly quickly, because for times over a hundred years or so you could get all you needed in present-day trash. In 1800 an empty plastic drink bottle with a screw top would have seemed a miracle of workmanship.