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> when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been. Most expensive it's been for a handful of years. 1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as rec

> when that storage is at its most expensive it's ever been. Most expensive it's been for a handful of years. 1TB of spinny disk cost a million dollars as recently as 1994, and half a billion dollars in 1980. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

nvme0n1p1 9d ago
Yeah, and a pound of sugar cost 8oz of gold a few thousand years ago, so inflation isn't real and food insecurity is a myth. If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't exist on the entire planet at the time.
- robotresearcher 9d ago
  No one claimed those things you’re arguing against. The claim is simply that storage has never been more expensive. A Macintosh 128K with a FLOPPY DRIVE cost $7,500 in inflation adjusted dollars. Can we please take a view of today that’s in a context of more than a few years? It would really help perspective sometimes.
  - nirava 9d ago
    this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit. > It would really help perspective sometimes It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
    - deleted 9d ago
      [deleted]
    - robotresearcher 7d ago
      Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you. As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then then a high end personal workstation (not big iron or server rack gear). The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM. The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800, including an upgrade to max RAM of $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM on this frontier workstation is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM, and more than a thousand times larger. It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive. We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things. RAM is ~10,000 times cheaper for today’s workstation purchasers per byte, or ~ten times cheaper for max-out-that-bastard, which normalizes for technical progress.

nvme0n1p1 9d ago

Yeah, and a pound of sugar cost 8oz of gold a few thousand years ago, so inflation isn't real and food insecurity is a myth. If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't exist on the entire planet at the time.

robotresearcher 9d ago
No one claimed those things you’re arguing against. The claim is simply that storage has never been more expensive. A Macintosh 128K with a FLOPPY DRIVE cost $7,500 in inflation adjusted dollars. Can we please take a view of today that’s in a context of more than a few years? It would really help perspective sometimes.
- nirava 9d ago
  this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit. > It would really help perspective sometimes It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
  - deleted 9d ago
    [deleted]
  - robotresearcher 7d ago
    Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you. As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then then a high end personal workstation (not big iron or server rack gear). The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM. The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800, including an upgrade to max RAM of $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM on this frontier workstation is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM, and more than a thousand times larger. It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive. We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things. RAM is ~10,000 times cheaper for today’s workstation purchasers per byte, or ~ten times cheaper for max-out-that-bastard, which normalizes for technical progress.