

More Tech Magic, if You Can Afford It - msabalau
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/technology/google-glass-offers-more-tech-magic-if-you-can-afford-it.html?ref=technology&_r=0

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msabalau
What's striking to me is the extent to which the past decade's innovations (ad
supported web services, carrier subsidized smartphones) have shifted people's
perceptions of a reasonable price for technology. Especially for early
adopters, who canonically paid more, and got less, and did so willingly play
around with an unevenly distributed bit of the future.

For example, the Apple 1 motherboard (to which one needed to add both effort
and other parts) costed a diabolical $666.66 in 1976, at a time when the US
median income was $11,308. According to a friendly internet inflation
calculator, that's $2727.25 in current dollars.

Flash forward to the 80s, and one of the early important popular personal
computers debuted for $595 in 1982, or $1435 in current dollars, roughly the
price of the Glass prototype today. If you pre ordered it before launch,
they'd throw in a cassette drive, so that you would have a place to store
programs, as opposed to having to type them in. This was a $70 value.

Thanks to Moore's Law and mass market adoption the price of these innovations,
as with so many others came down in price, and afforded more a more
capabilities to a broader and broader audiences. This was true for almost all
personal technology that succeeded from the 70s through the 90s, and is true
for many technologies today--such as 3D printing.

It is however strikingly not true for a lot of the web based services that
people call to mind when they think of innovation today--it was free to join
Twitter, say, and as an early adopter you didn't own something with less
features than later adopters--instead you potentially had a first mover
advantage, the ability to achieving a critical mass of followers in a way that
latecomers might find harder. You paid in attention, a pretty cheap coin,
which nevertheless does little to stop the whining when a service disappears
after an acquihire.

What's remarkable to someone who isn't in their 20s is that anyone would,
well, remark on the fact that cutting edge technology that is actually built
and manufactured in the real world would follow this path.

If wearables do become an important tech trend, and unless they rapidly follow
the very unusual path that smartphones took (arguably the most rapidly adopted
technology in human history), pricing could be very different from what people
have come to associate with innovation.

