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 (wi

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.