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Cost of iPhone X in 1957

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Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#131

Post by K2h »

noir_lord wrote: post #104
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…

I don't earn insane SV money but I could buy an iPhone X tomorrow, I save approx 50% of my salary every month but then I don't drive, own a house or have any debts. My total owed to everyone is I grew up poor though so my attitude to money is different to most people my age. If I don't have a minimum of 6mths income in savings I feel vulnerable. FWIW I won't be buying the iPhone X, my Moto G5 Plus is an ideal phone f…

off topic, sorry.... I am about 1 year in on the T460P as a personal machine - first laptop purchase in 10 years. looks like we came to the same conclusions.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#132

Post by freeflight »

feelin_googley wrote: post #60
outericky wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fault of the the webpage or the phone? multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....

"Fault of the webpage or the phone." Webpage. But this problem applies equally to local software. I believe there was a name for it but I cannot recall the term. The idea is that as hardware gets faster, software developers add bloat^W features so that the user always experiences the same speed. "Speed" mean something like the time taken to perform some routine user task. Microsoft has been usurping user resources li…

To be fair there has been somewhat of a shift in certain industry sectors. Some gaming companies finally recognized the importance of 60 fps gaming for many people, PS4Pro giving the user the option to choose between eye-candy or responsiveness is a very good thing to happen, with PC gaming there's been quite a boom with high-fps gaming with supporting displays becoming more affordable.

VR put latency on the general radar for many people previously completely oblivious to the issue, imho another good thing to happen.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#133

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dredmorbius wrote: post #73

I keep seeing these economic treatments of "how much progress has accelerated" (and have been seeing them for some 30-40 years now myself), and ... I'm starting to feel a case of three-card monty or the travelling dime problem -- keep moving the pieces quickly enough so that the audience^Wmarks don't spot the trick. First off: yes, absolutely, the cost of provisioning and operating electronic memory data storage and…

A modern phone actually makes a good attempt at replacing:

Notepad

Telephone

Letter post

Still camera

Movie camera (not common in 1957)

Security camera monitor (needs external hardware, but still)

Audio recorder

Cinema

Library

Music collection

Games arcade

Map and navigation system

Magazine and newspaper stand

Store catalogues (concierge shopping, to some extent)

News and weather on TV

TV (partly...)

Job search

Travel guide

Restaurant and hotel finder

Flight booking and checkin tool

Business memo distribution system

Classroom toys and child entertainment

Textbook and trainer for older/adult students (limited, but hardly non-existent)

Quick notes for friends and family

Clearly there's quite a bit more value than just "information delivery."

Source data doesn't need to be absorbed. No one in 1957 seriously expected readers to memorise the written text of newspapers or magazines, and no one seriously expects Facebook or Twitter users to memorise entire feeds today.

So the actual volume of useful information consumed daily has increased by a huge amount, and it's presented in a far more accessible and interactive/participative form than it used to be.

The point is that mobile devices connected to an open public data network generate huge economic synergies. Processing speed and memory are far less relevant than automation of old applications and the development of whole classes of new applications. Both have literally been transformative.

As for liberal democracy and journalism - those are no more endangered now than they used to be. Technology is a social multiplier, and if the roots of a culture aren't sound media of all kinds will reflect that - but that's a political problem, not one caused by technology.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#134

Post by gnu8 »

code_duck wrote: post #87
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…

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…

At the risk of getting into a completely different debate, the iPhone is not a computer. A computer allows the user to write and run any program of their choosing. An iPhone can only run programs approved by Apple, and the user cannot use the iPhone to generate new programs.

So while technically the iPhone is a computer, with a microprocessor that executes instructions, primary and secondary storage, and so on, the device has more in common with the traditional telephone and television, because it can be used for communicating and consuming content, but not general purpose computing.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#137

Post by tgb »

quuquuquu wrote: post #124
ajdlinux wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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 healt…

I disagree. I expect the median middle class American to have an iPhone X or other phone that costs within 15% of that. I ride the public transportation in a not-so-well-off area and new, high end phones are ubiquitous. I think the miscalculation that you're making is underestimating how important phones are for people, both in their usefulness and in their status. People will absolutely save money for an iPhone that won't/can't save money for emergency costs. The only question is whether the iPhone 8 will be enough to keep people from buying the X.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#138

Post by sitkack »

criddell wrote: post #127
icantdrive55 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That Atari had literally zero security holes.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#139

Post by DashRattlesnake »

kehrlann wrote: post #66
nopinsight wrote: post #56

Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. Unless a killer application needs a billion transistors, the value created over a previous iPhone is incremental. I think a better way to measure value is invention's cost effectiveness = price / (time * improvement to well-being) The denominator is how much the invention makes our lif…

Agreed. Discussing trends (speed of progress) with just two data points doesn't work.

...and one data point that is unnecessarily consumerist.

True technological progress isn't going to be presented at a fancy keynote, it's going to be messier.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#140

Post by teilo »

Now include the failure rate of electron tubes, and the literal bugs that would gum up the works, and this theoretical machine becomes impossible even ignoring the power consumption.
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