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Cost of iPhone X in 1957

bradford-delong.com

41–50 of 173 posts

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#41
post #5

Trying to answer the following might be fun as well: How much is a 1000 USD from today in that era in terms of purchasing power? What could you have bought with the equivalent amount of money, and how many people could have afforded the iPhone equivalent then?

According to saving.org, 111.42. According to http://www.earlytelevision.org/color.html a 21" color tv in 1955 was $755 1955 dollars... or more than 6 iPhones. This site seems to have more prices of goods http://fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1957/ A cheap ford car was $1879 or 17 iPhones. Kinda holds as a cheap ford today is around 14k

It's probably important to also consider these prices against the wages at the time.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#44
Amazing prediction... A11 bionic chip then was alien science fiction and might be considered privacy issue in real life considerations such as rise of communists or power consumption issues. Still is not an argument on Apple X high price.. I like more Raspbbery Pi analogy

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#45
post #12

this article is just made to justify the phone's price.

In a free market, there doesn't need to be a "justification" for the price of anything. The price is what someone is willing to pay.

Then that justification for the price is the justification for being willing to pay that price; same thing.

Also, "free market" is kind of a joke as a mantra. For example, "without interference" kind of would require a whole lot of marketing people stopping what they're doing. As it is now, many companies themselves are doing their best to interfere with the decisions of consumers and workers, in some cases even get in bed with each other and wage outright war on those they extract money from; so that's not a free market by a long shot.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#46

...and yet, even with all this computing power, simple tasks like loading a webpage full of text still take ridiculously long times. Maybe not with a '57 vacuum tube (transistors actually existed at the time already) computer, but then there's this: https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualC... The massive increase in computing power has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in complexity. Fo…

Definitely for worse in many cases. Every time I buy a new phone with better specs, I expect that things will be that much better, but they never are. Instead, the power is wasted on useless things like animation, apps that I can't shut off running in the background, etc.

> animation, apps that I can't shut off running in the background, etc.

The greatest performance issues stem from the attitude of the implementers. If you assume you have more memory than you'll ever need, chances are you'll need more than you'll ever have. Also, somehow no matter how much better our collective and public knowledge of cache-aware programming gets, we manage to make the data so much larger that it doesn't matter how cache aware we are.

disregarding "apps that I can't shut off running in the background", there is no good reason that animations, even the currently selected ones, should account for nearly as much power consumption as they do.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#47

24 MHz? I can’t make that work with a simple typo...

the original benchmarks the author likely used had a screenshot of some benchmark tool's output. It showed a 24 MHz processing speed which I also thought was weird. Could just be an anomaly in the benchmark tool.

Either way the tool they used (geekbench) apparently looks into chip-specific optimizations for tests and the rest of their process is not disclosed so it's possible all of their benchmarks are non-uniform (again based on an optimization ticket here: http://support.primatelabs.com/discussions/geekbench/18305-o...)

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#48

Honestly, who cares. A ton of modern inventions would've cost way more money in 1956. I'm not gonna go to the store and say, wow this microwave would've cost millions in the 50s, that's a super reasonable price. Compare 2017 phone prices to other 2017 phones.

It impresses the shit out of me that I can now walk around with a processor in my pocket that outperforms the leading Super Computer when I was coming up, The Cray 2, by several hundred times.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#49

...and yet, even with all this computing power, simple tasks like loading a webpage full of text still take ridiculously long times. Maybe not with a '57 vacuum tube (transistors actually existed at the time already) computer, but then there's this: https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualC... The massive increase in computing power has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in complexity. Fo…

Definitely for worse in many cases. Every time I buy a new phone with better specs, I expect that things will be that much better, but they never are. Instead, the power is wasted on useless things like animation, apps that I can't shut off running in the background, etc.

People often claim this, but I've never really found it to be the case. Faster processors and more memory let me run the same software much faster, or better software the same speed as the old, in general. So, perhaps you are seeing the second factor happening more, but don't want or need the improvements?

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#50
post #13

Things that haven't improved exponentially since 1957: Batteries Cars Houses People Dishwashers TVs Things that have improved exponentially since 1957: Disk drives Integrated Circuits RAM

I would say TVs have. Color, size, brightness, efficiency and resolution are all orders of magnitude higher.
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