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The bulk of the post is interesting, but this: "But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000

by cwyers 13y ago

The bulk of the post is interesting, but this: "But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it is to think in exponential terms." Is nonsense. The point of a general-purpose computer is that it's general purpose. But people aren't buying an iPhone to get a general-purpose computer, they're buying one to get something that does things. The comparison to 1991 gadgets is in terms of thing-doing, not MIPS and storage and whatnot. The comparison of raw compute power is interesting, but it doesn't invalidate the other kind of comparison.

DrStalker 13y ago
It's a fundamentally different question. The first article asked "how much would it cost to buy devices in 1991 to provide similar functionality?" while this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of raw capability?" This would have been an interesting article except it loses credibility by pretending the two questions are the same, when they are not.
- dpark 13y ago
  > while this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of raw capability?" Even that isn't really what it asks. If you wanted the raw storage capacity of an iPhone in 1991, you wouldn't buy 32GB of flash memory. You'd buy hard disks. 32GB of flash in 1991 would have been slow and poorly suited to the job. Speaking of hard drives, a GB of storage was not $10K in 1991. It ranged from $4.25K to 2.79K during that year. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm You'd have to go back to 1988 to hit the $10K/GB price.
  - cwyers 13y ago
    And of course, it depends on what you're storing. The Radio Shack ad has several things that would use storage -- a VHS camcorder, a microcassette recorder, a portable CD player. All of them used different storage mediums at different prices. If you want to price out the storage for the "1991 iPhone equivalent" the way the original analogy asks, "minutes of audio" and "minutes of video" is the unit, not gigabytes. The article gets away from those terms by posing a different question and pretending it's the same question.
byoung2 13y ago
The comparison to 1991 gadgets is in terms of thing-doing, not MIPS and storage and whatnot. The comparison of raw compute power is interesting, but it doesn't invalidate the other kind of comparison. That was my reaction as well. In 1800 you only needed 1 or two horses to pull a cart to get you from point A to point B. A typical car today might have 200 horsepower, but you don't actually compare that to having 200 actual horses in 1800.
- Retric 13y ago
  It works both ways though, a 200hp car can get you across the county a lot faster than 200 horses. Just as an iPhone can do a single threaded task faster than 3 billion dollars in 1991 hardware.
  - alex_c 13y ago
    But a 200hp car won't get you there 200 times faster than a horse. It'll get you there anywhere from 2 to 20+ times faster depending on the distance and the speed (city vs highway), but the comparison is pretty meaningless. (in other news, Google seems to have definitions for various animals' speeds. Neat!)

by cwyers 13y ago

DrStalker 13y ago

It's a fundamentally different question. The first article asked "how much would it cost to buy devices in 1991 to provide similar functionality?" while this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of raw capability?" This would have been an interesting article except it loses credibility by pretending the two questions are the same, when they are not.

dpark 13y ago
> while this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of raw capability?" Even that isn't really what it asks. If you wanted the raw storage capacity of an iPhone in 1991, you wouldn't buy 32GB of flash memory. You'd buy hard disks. 32GB of flash in 1991 would have been slow and poorly suited to the job. Speaking of hard drives, a GB of storage was not $10K in 1991. It ranged from $4.25K to 2.79K during that year. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm You'd have to go back to 1988 to hit the $10K/GB price.
- cwyers 13y ago
  And of course, it depends on what you're storing. The Radio Shack ad has several things that would use storage -- a VHS camcorder, a microcassette recorder, a portable CD player. All of them used different storage mediums at different prices. If you want to price out the storage for the "1991 iPhone equivalent" the way the original analogy asks, "minutes of audio" and "minutes of video" is the unit, not gigabytes. The article gets away from those terms by posing a different question and pretending it's the same question.

byoung2 13y ago

The comparison to 1991 gadgets is in terms of thing-doing, not MIPS and storage and whatnot. The comparison of raw compute power is interesting, but it doesn't invalidate the other kind of comparison. That was my reaction as well. In 1800 you only needed 1 or two horses to pull a cart to get you from point A to point B. A typical car today might have 200 horsepower, but you don't actually compare that to having 200 actual horses in 1800.

Retric 13y ago
It works both ways though, a 200hp car can get you across the county a lot faster than 200 horses. Just as an iPhone can do a single threaded task faster than 3 billion dollars in 1991 hardware.
- alex_c 13y ago
  But a 200hp car won't get you there 200 times faster than a horse. It'll get you there anywhere from 2 to 20+ times faster depending on the distance and the speed (city vs highway), but the comparison is pretty meaningless. (in other news, Google seems to have definitions for various animals' speeds. Neat!)