Not necessarily, look at all the projects on Kickstarter. There are still a lot of products that can be designed and build for less than $1 million.

Yeah, but those projects stand on the shoulders of giants. They are building on top of already existing open source hardware and software.

That's true of everything, though?

I mean a shitty $2 shirt wouldn't exist but for the power looms of the 19th century...

Apple built their first computers out of commercially available standard electronic components.

Don't you need to look at the products that hit the mass market?

A successful experiment on Kickstarter isn't really a fair comparison to the Apple I and Apple II, you need the Apple II of the Kickstarter project to make for an interesting comparison.

It's more that people have a higher expectation of what a device can to, and that generally means what the software can do.

I mean right now there are computers you can get that are orders of magnitude better in every dimension than the first Apple computer, that you can buy for less than $100 (I'm talking about the Pi and its ilk). But to make it do something useful there has to be a lot more effort expended to add peripherals and write proper software to match people's expectations.