That has become no longer true since last year.

20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.

But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.

Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.

For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)

I don't think this is a good argument. To be sure there has been a big jump in prices lately; we are familiar with the reasons so I'm not going to restate them here.

It happens that i just upgraded my main computer and phone, from >10 years old to >3 years old. And certainly I'm conscious of the fact that if I'd done this a year or even 6 months ago I'd have saved maybe 15% over what I paid. On the other hand, I'm also very conscious of that fact that the new gear is far more performant; the RAM is faster, the memory bus is wider, the system architecture is massively more efficient, there's specialized logic that just doesn't exist on my older machines. So I think it's a big mistake to say 'xGB of RAM costs the same now as 15 years ago' when it's performing ~10x beter.

> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

Some of the individual components may still be relatively expensive, but overall I don't think this is true at all. Compare a 2026 macbook pro with a 2011 macbook pro at a similar price and the 2026 model is gonna blow the 2011 model out of the water on any benchmark you care to use.

“how long it takes to open the browser and load a web page”.

a 2011 laptop will likely perform the same on this metric with a contemporary website. (a 2011 website with a 2011 laptop, and a 2026 laptop with a 2026 website).

“how long it takes to load the mail app and send a mail”

probably the 2011 laptop out performs on this metric.

I’m sure the modern laptop is a few times more powerful in terms of raw compute, but lets not confuse compute with utility, because better laptops should mean more capabilities, not more shitty developer harnesses to make the same programs we had before.

Yeah this blows my mind. My work laptops were pretty powerful with 16GB RAM 15 years ago, 8GB was also fine. Now people say you need 32 or 64 minimum just to function, that these 8GB MacBook neos are "entry level" for students and kids.

I know it's all "back in my day" but back in my day (15 years ago) everything was generally software so the laptop was computing more, now everything is a website but the laptops need 32GB to not run like through tar.

Both of my arm MacBook pros hang from time to time doing basic tasks. It's ridiculous and at least one nice side effect of a ram shortage might be developers starting to care about memory footprint again

This is another form of shrinkflation. Software quality (specifically performance) has cratered so that it could be built cheaper, faster, and with more ads.

I have had the same work Windows box since 2019 and it has become agonizingly slow over the last 7 years.

Anytime I look in Task Manager "Anti-malware Service Executable" is pegging at least one CPU core.

FWIW, Windows dev drives can situationally aleviate a bunch of this pain.

I'm still using a laptop from 2013. It's an HP EliteBook with a third generation i7.

Graphics processing is beat by any new laptop or even a phone, but good old processing power can load a web site in the same time.

It can be interesting seeing what is often seen as a common task can make computers of that vintage suddenly start to struggle when they can seem to do so many other tasks just fine.

One common thing I've experienced is browser-based video conferencing. A lot of chips in that generation didn't really have a lot of hardware accelerated video codecs, so a number of things have to rely on pure software and thus really crank the CPU. Meanwhile a cheap modern mobile chip can handle those same video streams without even breaking a sweat, due to having accelerators for those video codecs.

> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

Uhm, in 2011 4 GB RAM was the standard for PCs (some were still sold with only 2 GB), 8 GB was already enthusiast territory. 16 GB was a professional workstation.

Simple programs with simple functionality becoming massive and networked and somehow less functional is the other side of shrinkflation. The reason they became huge was developer convenience i.e. they cut costs.

The price of DRAM and SSDs might be back to a similar price as 20 years ago with the recent price spikes, but if they're the same price I'll probably take a high end computer from today than a high end computer from 15 years ago.

We had a good run where PCs were not very popular (all the "PC is dying" headlines we got, huh) and the parts were improving so fast that there was a healthy second hand market with aggressive prices.

Nowadays you get a cpu that's 10% every 2 years (or every 4 if you don't take into account amd 3d cache parts) and a gpu that is basically the same with better RT performance (unless you pay an obscene amount of cash for the nvidia top of the line).

Second hand market is way worse as parts last longer being relevant and prices in retail and second hand markets go up as result. Put on top of that a crypto frenzy followed by an AI frenzy and the DIY market has been in a dark age for a decade.

I'd say a pc you buy today is more performant for the price than one bought 10 years earlier. But 10 years earlier you could get yourself something very nice for 500 bucks and today you just can't do that as entry level everything starts at like 700 bucks or more.

If you measure ‘bang’ by hardware metrics, they’re clearly orders of magnitude better value today. But if ‘bang’ means usefulness at solving life’s problems, it’s harder to compare, because the problems have changed so much, and so many of them now come from computers.

But what about 1 year ago?

yeah but now you need 1GB of ram to run the weather apps so..

Flights are cheaper than ever.

No, they are not. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/airfare-infl...

Here's an example beauro of transportation article that has a downward slope in inflation adjusted price over the last 30 years (Fig 1). Not sure what explains the diff in our links.

https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/first-quarter-2026-average-air-...

The previously-linked chart appears to show the rate-of-change of the airfare, by itself. It shows how airfare prices themselves went up or down over time, as a percentage, without taking anything else into consideration. That can be useful data, but it is not at all the kind of inflation-adjusted chart that we're used to seeing.

Your link shows charts that include airfare prices integrated with inflation. That's closer to the kind of charts that we're used to seeing when inflation comes up. But it doesn't say which Consumer Price Index (there are many!) was used for adjustment, so that's annoying; it's hard to establish what it means exactly. It's also lacking in granularity and history.

---

I usually find that FRED is better for this stuff. The generated charts include citations for source data and also whatever maths were used in the final presentation.

Here's a chart from FRED of airfare price index over time, adjusted by inflation using the usual All Items, Urban Consumers price index. (There's some error included here since that latter index includes transportation and transportation includes airfare, but it seems like that's in the realm of 1% or so and I can only work with the tools that I have.)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XRwq

The vertical scale set so that 100 = June 1, 2026 because that's what I picked (but anyone can pick a different date for 100 using the Edit Graph link; the shape of the line stays the same).

Anyway, it shows that flights are pretty cheap ~right now. The data doesn't show that it's cheaper-than-ever (that happened in May of 2020), but it's pretty darned cheap anyway even with the ongoing war in Ukraine and the stuff that has been going on in Iran.

Are these prices comparing equivalent services? Shrinkflation is very much a thing in the airline industry as well.

Probably not. But it’s much more accessible to the “common man” than before. In the 60s the entire plane was a premier experience few could afford.

yes, they have more hardware power, but the bloated software requires more hardware power, so in most cases it doesn't really translate into gains for the user

The exception that proves the rule.

The phrase "exception that proves the rule" refers to an apparent exception to the rule's outputs actually being explained by it having divergent inputs, i.e. if you claim P=>Q, then the exception that proves the rule would be an instance of ~Q=>~P.

What's different about computers that makes this applicable here?

This is not what the “exception that proves the rule” means.

If a sign says “No parking on saturdays”, that is an exception that can be used to infer the rule “parking here is okay the rest of the time”.

Both usages are common, and Wikipedia references both of them. But in the sense that it was being used, "rules can have exceptions, therefore this exception 'proves' the rule rather than falsifying it" is not valid, and is not consistent with either usage.

What they likely mean is that pointing to one exception that is notable only because it violates the general trend is not evidence against the trend.

The term is often also used simply as claiming the existence of a rule by claiming the exception.

It's one of those terms where I am pretty confident that I see the original use more rarely than the technically incorrect variations to the point I'd hesitate to call them incorrect any more.

> This meaning of the phrase, which for Fowler is the original and clearest meaning ... This argument states if an exception exists or has to be stated, then this exception proves that there must be some rule to which the case is an exception

So no, OP used the correct definition and no wide spread usage uses ~Q=>~P. That's a weird logical formulation that was randomly concocted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

Said another way:

Rule: It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.

Exception: computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck

This proves the rule because if it's an exception to the rule, therefore the rule must exist in the first place.

That argument only works if someone states the exception from the start, not when someone makes the claim while using the term.

No you’re just intentionally misunderstanding the usage to avoid admitting you’re incorrect. The usage in the thread is correct.

Poster 1: everything is worse

Poster 2: but compute has gotten better

Poster 3: that’s the exception to the rule that everything has gotten worse, proving the rule exists

No I am not. What you're demonstrating is exactly the basis for why the new usage is spreading.

Poster 2 has raised a disagreement with the original claim. There was no implied rule. Poster 3 used the claim of it being an exception to imply a third rule that neither of the first two posters had claimed, as opposed to making a statement where the exception demonstrated the existence of a rule in the first place.

If you're going to make false claims and lie about my intent, then at least don't be entirely wrong while doing it.

If you're going to continue this thread you can talk to yourself - I have no interest in continuing a discussion when you start lying about my intent.

> So no, OP used the correct definition and no wide spread usage uses ~Q=>~P. That's a weird logical formulation that was randomly concocted.

No, most logically coherent usage of that phrase absolutely does reflect ~Q=>~P, which was not "randomly concocted", but was rather was determined via logical reasoning.

> Rule: It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.

> Exception: computers i think are more affordable now than even 20 years ago, in bang for buck

> This proves the rule because if it's an exception to the rule, therefore the rule must exist in the first place.

No, a standalone claim that contradicts the premise of a previously claimed general rule does not "prove" that original claim.

If I say "it hasn't rained all week" and you respond with "but it did rain on Tuesday", you're pointing out evidence that falsifies the general claim about it not raining, not demonstrating an exception that strengthens its validity otherwise.

This usage only makes sense if the "exceptional" claim is formulated as an exception to some unstated assumption, but even there, does not actually substantiate the validity of that assumption, but rather just reveals that the assumption is being made.

Another commenter offered a good example of this: "no parking on Saturdays" carries the implied premise that parking is permitted on other days of the week: it's nature as an imperative statement that applies special treatment to a particular case implies that the general case is something else.

But "computers have become cheaper over the past 20 years" does not in itself imply any assumptions about general economic trends or other categories of goods, and certainly doesn't prove the validity any assumptions about either.

20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)

So are video games. The GTA6 pricing controversy has been really confusing, this is one of the cheapest games of its story/depth size in all video gaming history.