That's the price equivalent of a $500 fridge from the 50s.
Most companies don't do grand designs or long-standing flagship products meant to be advertised for years, but that may actually be on the consumer by constantly choosing the new thing. I don't think any car manufacturer has left a car design completely unchanged for longer than 10 years, for instance. Same for computer or laptop manufacturers.
{vendor power decrease} led to {fierce competition on unit price} led to {consolidation of vendors and manufacturing cost minimization / volume maximization} led to {offshore lower cost manufacturing} led to {decreased design agility}
Consequently, there's less appetite for the type of wild experiments that characterized 1950s and 1960s design.
Low volume = not interested
It used to be that tech was insulated from the phenomenon, but I think Google shows the same progression playing out. It just took tech longer to consolidate.
It’s funny that one reason CPI hasn’t increased as fast as nominal prices in some cases is because it also factors in the quality of goods.
e.g. modern cars are more expensive but also significantly better (they both have more features and last longer) I think this applies to a whole bunch of other products too.. I don’t know how accurate it is though, guess it depends on user preferences.
My personal, completely-unsupported theory is it was a combination of 3 qualities.
(1) New types of things, while unlike anything that came before, were still simple and understandable enough that someone without formal engineering training could understand their use and offer improvements.
(2) Engineering was still seen as something that was approachable by anyone, and so more people availed themselves of the design tools it presented.
(3) Manufacturing was physically colocated with design, increasing agility to implement improvements.
Since then, we've moved into geographically disparate manufacturing of such optimized and tightly-packaged systems that as simple of an ask as "Could that light be red instead of green?" requires overwhelming machinations to design and implement, resulting in "Let's just leave it green." (Repeat for every UX component of a system)