
How much would an iPhone have cost in 1991? - shawndumas
http://www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/much-iphone-cost-1991/
======
cwyers
The bulk of the post is interesting, but this:

"But the fact that so many were so impressed by an assertion that an iPhone
possesses the capabilities of $3,000 worth of 1991 electronics products – when
the actual figure exceeds $3 million – reveals how fundamentally difficult it
is to think in exponential terms."

Is nonsense. The point of a general-purpose computer is that it's general
purpose. But people aren't buying an iPhone to get a general-purpose computer,
they're buying one to get something that does things. The comparison to 1991
gadgets is in terms of thing-doing, not MIPS and storage and whatnot. The
comparison of raw compute power is interesting, but it doesn't invalidate the
other kind of comparison.

~~~
DrStalker
It's a fundamentally different question. The first article asked "how much
would it cost to buy devices in 1991 to provide similar functionality?" while
this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of raw
capability?"

This would have been an interesting article except it loses credibility by
pretending the two questions are the same, when they are not.

~~~
dpark
> _while this one asks "how much would it have cost to buy the same amount of
> raw capability?"_

Even that isn't really what it asks. If you wanted the raw storage capacity of
an iPhone in 1991, you wouldn't buy 32GB of flash memory. You'd buy hard
disks. 32GB of flash in 1991 would have been slow and poorly suited to the
job.

Speaking of hard drives, a GB of storage was not $10K in 1991. It ranged from
$4.25K to 2.79K during that year.
[http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm) You'd
have to go back to 1988 to hit the $10K/GB price.

~~~
cwyers
And of course, it depends on what you're storing. The Radio Shack ad has
several things that would use storage -- a VHS camcorder, a microcassette
recorder, a portable CD player. All of them used different storage mediums at
different prices. If you want to price out the storage for the "1991 iPhone
equivalent" the way the original analogy asks, "minutes of audio" and "minutes
of video" is the unit, not gigabytes. The article gets away from those terms
by posing a different question and pretending it's the same question.

------
cameldrv
Interesting article, but guess what the point is, coming from the AEI. It's
actually about gutting social security. If you take their view of incredible
deflation in tech products, it cancels out the inflation in everything else.
That means the inflation adjustment in social security is less, and in the
long run, social security becomes insignificant. This type of messaging is
true mastery of the long game.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Their inflationary calculations are very tendentious and ignore substitution
effects. 32GB of flash memory in 1991 would have cost $1.44 million: Sure. So
you wouldn't have used flash memory, you'd have used something cheaper, like
audio tapes and film, and you would have had an inferior experience for it...
but not $1.44 million worse of an experience. These figures are meaningless.
That's why the CPI uses an actual market basket that's meant to represent what
people actually buy. People whose payments are linked to the CPI have not in
fact seen their payments deflated by such astonishing factors.

The BLS (which is responsible for the official CPI) has a recent overview on
possibilities of error and related considerations:
[http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-1/consumer-price-index-
da...](http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-1/consumer-price-index-data-quality-
how-accurate-is-the-us-cpi.htm) Their conclusion: "Measurement of price change
in a large economy is sufficiently complex that the accuracy of an estimate is
difficult to gauge and is likely to be debated. The CPI cannot claim to be a
completely precise measure of inflation and publishes the variance of its
estimates. Several potential sources of bias have been identified in the CPI
and addressed, though there continues to be debate over to what extent and in
what direction bias may still exist and the ways in which BLS can continue to
increase accuracy."

~~~
nswanberg
Sure, members of the public or small and medium sized organizations may have
substituted, but if yours was the sort of organization that bought, say, a
Cray Y-MP for $35 million, paying $3.56 million and putting this thing on a
network would have been a bargain, which makes me think that the authors may
not have taken the value of this being an integrated system into account. And
even if they pegged the iPhone at exactly the same price as a Cray Y-MP they
would still be low due to the iPhone's vastly lower power consumption.

Finding out that this article was written by the American Enterprise Institute
made me feel dirty until I reflected on the fact that nothing in the article
appears to be grossly incorrect, and discarding an interesting article for
some possibly bad political implications seems like a bad way to live one's
life.

Another thing that no-one has yet pointed out is that even this article's
calculation could still probably be extremely low if the cost of developing
iOS and the related apps are included.

------
prr
12 cycles of Moore's Law puts that 3.56 million figure at $869.14. Unlocked
cost on the Apple store: $749

~~~
fortepianissimo
Care to detail your calculation?

~~~
prr
$3 560 000 divided by 2, 12 times :-)

The effect of Moore's "law" is that processing power doubles approximately
every 2 years, while the cost halves.

If 1 "unit" of processing currently costs $1; in 2 years time, 2 units will
cost $1. Or that 1 unit costs 0.50.

~~~
T-hawk
Moore's law is that the _density_ of discrete components (transistors, storage
cells) increases. Cost and speed are knock-on effects. It just so happens that
density does drive CPUs to be faster for the same production cost and storage
to be either more capacious or physically smaller. But some aspects of
computing performance don't benefit from density, like memory response time
for example.

------
ziggit
I always like to play a game when I'm carrying multiple laptops in a backpack:

What's the latest year that my backpack be a Top 500 Supercomputing center.

The results can be pretty entertaining sometimes.

~~~
fournm
That reminds me of the joke about the A7 in the iPhone being faster than the
old PowerPC cores in the G5s, which wasn't the first time that a phone's
processor beat an older laptop's, but the first time that the comparison was
Apple's to Apple's. Terrible pun, but it happened in what, a 5 year span?

I play the same game, and I love it (no one ever believes me about it,
either).

~~~
MPSimmons
I'm being pedantic (sorry), but to the best of my knowledge, there never was a
G5 laptop, which is one of the reasons for the switch to Intel.

~~~
fournm
Ah, no, you're correct! I had originally misremembered the statement (going
with G4 and laptop), and forgot to change the word laptop to desktop when I
switched it to the G5. That was totally my bad.

------
coldcode
Either nothing or infinity. You couldn't build an iPhone in 1991. Maybe if you
built a time machine first.

~~~
MPSimmons
Exactly. The word you're looking for is "undefined". Even _with_ four million
dollars, it's impossible. As other people have mentioned, it might have been
possible to build something that worked in a similar fashion, but it most
certainly wouldn't have had even a similar form factor.

It's a product of the technology available at its time.

------
pessimizer
Software was many orders of magnitude more efficient in 1991 than now, so if
you're trying to make a functional equivalent (which I'm assuming because the
example equivalences are 1000x the size of a phone) rather than a copy, it's
important to remember that you wouldn't need either the same processing power
or same storage capacity.

An equivalent _excluding media_ , rather. A few copies of peanut butter jelly
time would fill up a functionally equivalent iPhone's disk.

edit: MIDI Peanut Butter Jelly Time?

------
boyaka
I'm sure if you looked at the raw material cost the iPhone would have been a
lot cheaper, right? I mean, if you took all of the knowledge on how to build
the factories and design the tools and fabrication equipment, and you had
people skilled enough to understand it and implement it, the iPhones in 1991
would probably cost a lot less.

~~~
logicallee
What are you saying exactly? Apple doesn't take raw materials as input and
produces iPhones as input. Apple takes components as input. Those components
didn't exist.

If someone built a few of them using today's knowledge, it would be expensive.
Very expensive.

Only at scale are they cheap. They are only at scale if everyone is buying
them. The same process that would cause the scale in components might cause
the change in commodity prices.

So your point is hard to understand...

~~~
boyaka
My point is simply that the USD is now worth less and the raw materials are
now more scarce and expensive than in 1991. You are right in calling me out
about the scale though, as I guess that even if you had all the knowledge to
create all the components necessary, you still would have a much smaller
market and therefore less offsetting of the initial cost. However, if say, you
made 2 phones for everybody, maybe that would bring the market up enough to
reach the same scale as today's market?

~~~
dpark
If you had all the knowledge to create the components, you would still need a
decade or more of industrial advancement to reach the point where you could
actually build the necessary components. Knowing how to build every piece of
an iPhone wouldn't get you an iPhone in 1991, even if you had all the money in
the world. You couldn't build the fundamental technologies fast enough.

~~~
boyaka
Industrial advancement IS the knowledge of creating components. Hordes of
people at giant companies are improving every minor aspect of the tools that
create these components. If we had all of the knowledge these companies have
built up at any point in history, it could be implemented. The tools are the
HIGHEST cost in creating components because they cannot be changed
dramatically, and it's difficult to put them through iterations of improvement
because you need to keep using the expensive tool you made to make up the cost
of what you paid for it.

~~~
dpark
Industrial advancement isn't just building on knowledge. It's building on
infrastructure. You couldn't go back to the stone age and produce steel,
because the infrastructure for creating steel simply didn't exist. There were
no iron mines, no foundries, no skilled blacksmiths. You could speed up the
process, but you'd still be dead before the first steel sword was forged.

Likewise, the infrastructure for building iPhone components didn't exist in
1991. The A7 is built on a 28nm process. The 486 in 1991 was shipping with (I
believe) a 0.8 micrometer process. So the infrastructure of the time was three
orders of magnitude away from being able to build this chip. And this says
nothing of the other components which faced similar technological hurdles. You
couldn't make all these hurdles go away. Building up major infrastructure
takes time, and no amount of knowledge can reduce that time to zero.

------
pcurve
Today's $1,000 core i7 machine has about the same GFLOP as supercomputer of
1991 that cost $100,000,000.

So $3 million is understating. They couldn't have built anything close to
today's smartphone even with $3 billion with B.

------
canistr
This is such an odd calculation and application of Moore's law.

Without going into any analyses or details, travelling to the moon should be
much cheaper and faster (yes I am aware of low-cost orbital space flights --
and even paying it with bitcoin! --, but it still isn't travelling to the
moon).

