Re:AI is killing the cheap smartphone
by xg15 on Saturday May 23, 2026 @06:00AM
(#48246368)
The result of equivalent deregulation would be slums and shantytowns. But hey, cheap rent! I don't think this is s desirable outcome either.
Also, from the article:
> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.
That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.
Also, from the article:
> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.
That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.