Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cost of iPhone X in 1957

bradford-delong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 173 posts

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#121

Post by ajdlinux »

pasta wrote: post #89
code_duck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family were not nearly millionaires when we bought a $1500 equivalent computer in 1982, but this phone costs less than that. And a iPhone X isn't a phone, it's a computer. I agree you do need to be in an upper tier economically to afford one, but only speaking globally. People bought plenty of laptops when they averaged well over $1000. The way phones are financed makes them much more attainable, also. The way peo…

I like to note that a smartphone is indeed a computer with one huge difference: the phone does break more often. It's no fun dropping a $1000 phone in the toilet or down the stairs. A lot of people forget this.

Alas, this is why "smartphone insurance" is now a market segment

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#122

Post by frou_dh »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #118
frou_dh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pronounce it "ten" so you expect them to say "ten-two", or "the new iPhone ten" year after year?

My point wasn't about the name but about the new product line. iPhone X is a new product line. Apple have made fundamental changes to the user interface. The iPhone 9 would be the successor to the iPhone 8. Whatever name Apple comes up with for iPhone X's successor, it's almost certain to keep the new 'all screen' interface.

Well I'm sure it's Apple's intention to not give up a super fat margin after establishing it. It remains to be seen whether in the medium term the market would keep its enthusiasm for a "legacy" iPhone range which becomes implicitly old and busted in the shadow of the "real" iPhone and competitor products.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#124

Post by quuquuquu »

ajdlinux wrote: post #120
quuquuquu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think is also important to consider is median income and net worth of US citizens at that time. In the early 50s, much pf Europe and Asia was still rebuilding from war, and the US held an effective monopoly on multiple industries. From the data I could find for 1952 in the US, a house was 5 years of income and a new car was half a year's income. For many people in the US today, a new car (post tax dollars) is…

$1000 USD is 1.8 weeks full time of the minimum wage in my country (Australia). It might be dumb for a minimum wage earner to spend 1.8 weeks of their income on a mobile phone, but I absolutely believe a certain subset of working-class Australians will, with some difficulty, manage to scrape together enough to buy one. Or, more realistically, they'll finance one on a $100/month phone plan, which I also think is a bit…

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-americans-spend-their-mon...

Here's a chart of how a middle class American family currently spend their money.

Please note 74k in income is pre tax, and 57k in expenses is post tax.

So, the average American family is actually spending every dollar they earn.

I don't know where technology fits in to this current budget, but you can see it's pretty much pegged due to housing and healthcare.

$1,000 for one phone is out of the budget for all middle class Americans, period, unless they begin to cut back on cars or food.

Which, you can assume that some might, but on the aggregate, they won't.

I could go out and buy literally 100 motorcycles tomorrow, but I wouldn't even buy one, and I damn sure wouldn't buy one that was 5x more expensive than a similar motorcycle that isn't "luxury".

Thank you for writing :)

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#125

Post by CydeWeys »

Spooky23 wrote: post #110
code_duck wrote: post #77

This comparison seems fairly fantastical and irrelevant. Something from within the history of consumer electronics would be more useful to consider, in my opinion. For example, in 1982, the wildly popular low-end home entertainment computer, the Commodore 64, was released at $595, or about $1500 after inflation adjustment. On release in 1977, the Apple II was $1298, or over $5000 in today's terms. You could pay $400…

I talked to a guy with a long career in emergency management. According to him, earth.nullschool.net, which is available to any anyone anywhere today for free, is superior to many classes of tools available to folks in the field for his entire career. His opinion was that a similar thing would literally be worth multiple billions to the Federal government in the 80s/90s. That's the thing -- not only are phones techno…

Did he give you any ideas of how that tool is actually used by people in the field? It's a nifty visualization, but I'm struggling to come up with how it could be worth billions of dollars. What kinds of scenarios is it providing answers to that would otherwise be really difficult to get?

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#127

Post by criddell »

icantdrive55 wrote: post #91
code_duck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family were not nearly millionaires when we bought a $1500 equivalent computer in 1982, but this phone costs less than that. And a iPhone X isn't a phone, it's a computer. I agree you do need to be in an upper tier economically to afford one, but only speaking globally. People bought plenty of laptops when they averaged well over $1000. The way phones are financed makes them much more attainable, also. The way peo…

Yea, I bought an Atari St 1200 I believe in 1983 for college. It did seem like a big purchase initially. I used it for 6 years of college. I mainly used it for word processing. It never skipped a beat. Once every two years, I would need to re-ink the ribbon with ink myself. Just dipped the ribbon into the bottle, and rewind. I was too cheap to buy a new ribbon. Besides the initial outlay, I spent $2.00 days on ink in…

A big difference is that the Atari probably wasn't connected to the internet 24-7. Your ST wasn't being probed around the clock by hackers across the country and around the world. It likely wasn't tied into your banking and probably didn't hold a lot of your personal communications and health data. The Atari probably had a lot of security holes but it didn't matter that nobody was fixing things and sending a frequent stream of updates.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#128

Post by freeflight »

adventured wrote: post #79
sjwright wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA also subsidizes fossil fuel industries pretty heavily, so those renewables subsidies are (at least in part) just leveling the field.

The fossil fuels industry pays extremely high tax rates on their profits and has for decades (Exxon and Chevron typically average near 35%, among the highest corporate tax rates anywhere). They've been subsidizing the research into renewables for a very long time. While I agree there should be zero subsidies for fossil fuels, the corporate taxes they've paid drastically outweigh the modest subsidies the fossil fuel c…

> The fossil fuels industry pays extremely high tax rates on their profits and has for decades (Exxon and Chevron typically average near 35%, among the highest corporate tax rates anywhere).

And yet they have still been doing more than fine for all these decades, they still do really good.

> modest subsidies the fossil fuel corporations have received

"Modest" is an odd word to use considering that subsidies come in more forms than straight up sending money to a company, companies can also be subsidized by taxing them less on certain behavior by weighting factors differently, like on long-term environmental impacts [0].

I've seen a way more detailed breakdown of this issue before in another study, but I just can't find it anymore.

[0] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew07...

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#130

Post by freeflight »

oliveshell wrote: post #57
Houshalter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if a government started buying trillions of vacuum tubes, companies would quickly get much more efficient at producing then and there would be a huge investment into researching alternatives. But that brings up the question, what tech could we be subsidizing today so we can get it faster?

Nuclear fusion.

The US is participating in the ITER project [0], that's pretty much as good as it get's right now unless a country starts their own, very expensive, project.

[0] https://science.energy.gov/~/media/fes/pdf/DOE_US_Participat...

Post reply on HN