This is a great example, because if Apple had launched the iPhone SE in 2015 at $10,000 alongside their $199 6S, it would have bounced like a bad joke, and probably only a few wealthy people would have bought them.
So in one sense, yes, tech has gotten cheaper, but in another sense there's a limit to how much deflation can really be stated because you can't say someone buying a new iPhone in 2020 is saving $9000 relative to what they would have spent five years prior. They wouldn't have spent it.
There's also a recent inflationary trend in tech, in that old computers actually slow down due to the growing CPU/memory demands of software and web apps to deliver more or less equivalent value to what they used to.
Re:The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
by matthewdgreen on Monday May 10, 2021 @09:40AM
(#27105864)
Yes, but so what? My current iPhone now devotes trillions of potentially-useful cycles to NOPs or processor sleep cycles. Does this mean that $32m of actual value is being created for me?
That’s key, people are spending more on mobile phones now than they were a decade ago. The benefit they get is difficult to quantify on an individual basis, certainly the difference between a phone from 5 years ago have very little difference than one from today, better camera perhaps, but how many people who bought a separate camera in 2016 don’t bother now.
Today’s top-end iPhone probably would have cost upwards of $10,000 in 2015, if it were even possible to manufacture.
As an aside, someone did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that the equivalent computing power of a 2014 iPhone would have cost $32 million in 1991: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/how-much-would...