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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 o
by 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 agoAnd 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.