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Cost of iPhone X in 1957

bradford-delong.com

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Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#161

Post by morganvachon »

feelin_googley wrote: post #160
morganvachon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"By the time the user purchased a new computer, the company had a new software version that already uses up whatever resource gains the new hardware provided. Pre-installed. The end result is the user experiences the same speed." This is true, but there's a couple of other factors involved. One is the recent gains in storage efficiency, and the other is familiarity over time with the new gains. When SSDs hit the scen…

"When SSDs hit the scene, you could migrate your existing installation to solid state storage." If by "installation" you mean the OS, I have not needed SSDs. I migrated my installation to RAM. I stopped using disk for the OS and data I am working with. I can fit everything I need in RAM. I still use disks sometimes for long term storage of infrequently accessed data, but it surprises me how infrequently I need them.…

Yep, I've run a minimal Linux environment entirely in RAM on an old PIII laptop in recent times, it's fun stuff.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#162

Post by dredmorbius »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #133
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 Trave…

Thank you for that list, all of which is precisely information delivery, or capture. Having lived in both eras, I'm rather familiar with the general set, and not entirely unsympathetic to some of the benefits. And costs.

You might consider how else such needs, or in many cases, wants, were previously satisfied. Or accommodated, or in which activities worked around their lack. And how, often in initially subtle ways, the smaartphone's presence has changed the structures and institutions it interacts with.

But as I've expanded on this elsewhere, the supposed economic analysis of DeLong is missing key insights.

Data and computation, much as work, expand to fill available time. It's less how much computation can you buy and far more how much are you willing to spend. A curious aspect of computers is that the price points have remained remarkably resilient. In nominal currency, even. The original IBM PC cost $1,565. A current-generation Lenovo (successor to IBM), say, the P310SFF is priced at about half that, $710, plus $160 for the monitor, or a total of $870. It seems that for typical end-use the question is more of "how much computing can I buy for a given budget, than how much will X amount of computing power cost me.

As for technology (and especially communications) not changing or disrupting democracy or society, I'd very much suggest you reassess that premise as it seems to me that every communications revolution, dating to speech itself, has had profound and often highly disruptive effects. Elizabeth Eisenstein captures some of that in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. The role of cheap press, radio, audio tape, microphones and public address, photoreproduction, and cinema in the rise and spread of fascism is another hugely instructive episode.

DeLong expresses awareness of none of this.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#163

Post by Spooky23 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #125
Spooky23 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wind speed at any given point. Situational awareness.

I think his point was less about the tool as is, but the simplicity and ease of access to information.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#164

Post by code_duck »

sitkack wrote: post #138
criddell wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would consder submitting that to some sort of Hall of Fame for statements that can't possibly be true.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#166

Post by nopinsight »

clairity wrote: post #152
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…

your first point about diminishing returns posits a reasonable (if ambiguous) definition of (incremental) value to the consumer: that it should improve the lives of users. but then you say... > Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious. which is puzzling in light of your very own definition of incremental value. is google'…

I compared Google to "older search engines" like Altavista and Excite in the 90's. Bing and other current engines are indeed much closer to the current Google in quality than those older engines to the initial Google at its inception. The delta in quality that Google provided when it was invented was a huge factor in getting people to switch from well-established engines then.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#167

Post by noir_lord »

K2h wrote: post #131
noir_lord wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love it, fast, lightweight, the 2560x1440 screen at 14" is lovely.

Not cheap but an i7-7700HQ in this form factor is a decent amount of grunt and with the nvme it's faster than my old i5-2500K desktop at home by a fair margin, it doesn't feel noticeably slower in practice than my Ryzen desktop for most things (until I spin up 3-4VM's and then I do start to notice but really 4VM's with 4GB of RAM each on a laptop is just crazy).

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#168

Post by tgb »

quuquuquu wrote: post #153
tgb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for your perspective :) High end as in iphone 5c, iphone 6, or iphone 7? My iphone 5c, cracked screen, was like $40 off of ebay or something. When it came out, the original price was like 200-400 depending on contracts and gb capacity. I think you will see the same thing happening with iphone 6s too. But if you told me that you see a large number of fast food employees and janitorial employees and etc ridin…

It's true, I don't really know enough to tell how recent the phone is (I'm an Android user and don't even know that market very well). I do think people spend "more than they can afford" on their phones. Compared to past generations that spent more than they could afford on cars, say, it's a relatively cheap thing to splurge on. And if they're going to splurge on one thing, lots of people will pick their phone these days.

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#169

Post by clairity »

nopinsight wrote: post #166
clairity wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your first point about diminishing returns posits a reasonable (if ambiguous) definition of (incremental) value to the consumer: that it should improve the lives of users. but then you say... > Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious. which is puzzling in light of your very own definition of incremental value. is google'…

I compared Google to "older search engines" like Altavista and Excite in the 90's. Bing and other current engines are indeed much closer to the current Google in quality than those older engines to the initial Google at its inception. The delta in quality that Google provided when it was invented was a huge factor in getting people to switch from well-established engines then.

then we are in violent agreement! =)

Re: Cost of iPhone X in 1957

#170

Post by code_duck »

goelakash wrote: post #105
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 am not an iPhone user, or ever bought one. But from the perspective of novelty, I would prefer to buy an iPhone x over an iPhone 8, for the exclusive features. Otherwise I'd stick to an affordable and feature-filled Android.

That makes sense and I almost wonder if all of this talk about the price is somehow sneaky marketing. iPhone has traditionally been positioned as a moderate luxury phone... this price is only marginally more than the current top end phones. But if you're going to buy a phone for status, don't you want to buy the most expensive? And all of this talk in the media about how expensive the iPhone is service to cement that notion in peoples minds.
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