Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Interest Tidbit: An iPhone would have cost $3.5m in 1991

Keeping with the theme of  increasing quality vs price of products, there is this article by Bret Swanson at TechPolicyDaily.com that calculates that the capabilities of an iPhone would have cost, $3.5 million in 1991.

Of course,all the hodgepodge of components wouldn't fit in your pocket and, therefore, the value of the miniaturization isn't included in the $3.5 million figure.

Also of note, the article mentions that a gigabyte of hard drive storage cost $10,000 in 1991 and today costs only 4 cents.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In 1994, I purchased a HDD for $400, and it had 1 GB capacity.

Dave Hayes said...

If you got a gig for $400 in 1994, you got a good deal. Matt Komorowski has historical price data on the cost of 1 gig from 1980 to 2009. His data shows a price listing of $950.00 in 1994 (down from $2,000 the previous year). His data does put the cost of a gig at $7,000 (not $10,000) in 1991. See http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte