Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Expensive Things That Are Now Cheap”.
The human race is really extraordinary. We’Re making new fancy expensive things all the time, but as we make more of those, the old expensive things become less expensive. That’S right! We’Re talking about phones, the first consumer cell phone, the motorola dynatac 8000 x, sounds badass was released at a time when cordless landlines were just starting to catch on. So it had a really steep early adopter tax. A dynatac could run you 3995 us dollars, which is equivalent to around ten thousand six hundred and fifty dollars in 2021, and, as you might expect, you didn’t exactly get a lot for the money other than mass. It stood nearly 10 inches tall and weighed two pounds, but after charging the battery for 10 hours, you only got 30 minutes of talk time.
The first true smartphone, the ibm simon from 1993, was more impressive, as it had bells and whistles like email, an appointment, calendar and even predictive text. But its initial price was a still steep 999.93 and like the dynatac, it had terrible battery life lasting only one hour. Of course, these days, it’s easy to get a mid-range smartphone for only a couple hundred bucks or even for free with certain mobile plans and by mid-range we mean its high resolution.
Photos are just a little less crisp than a flagship, but other things have gotten cheaper too. Let’S move on and talk about something that’s been a mainstay for even longer than cell phones, televisions, one of the first mass-produced commercially successful tvs was the rca630ts released in 1946. At a price of 352., although that doesn’t sound like much that’s over thousand six hundred dollars today, roughly enough to buy an 83 inch oled, but the 630 ts was actually a big chunker and i’m not just talking about its 85 pound weight. It boasted a 10 inch screen which was considered large at the time. However, it wouldn’t take long for the first color tv to appear with a gigantic 15-inch display. I’M doing this, but it’s like this. This was a westinghouse model from 1954 that sold for 12.95 or 13 grand today, but if you’re not interested in tech, that agent we’ve come a long way in affordability from even early flat panel tvs.
The first models that were available to consumers were based on a plasma panel that came out in 1997 and even though it cost a whopping 15 000. It only had a resolution of 852 by 480, despite being 42 inches diagonally, which pales in comparison to today’s super low end 720p sets. Yes, they still make those a big part of the reason. Today’S tvs are much more affordable. Is that lcds quickly overtook them in the market? Lcd sets are cheaper to produce and over the years manufacturing processes improved to the point where they rivaled plasma sets and quality. Today, it’s not difficult to find sub 40 inch lcd tvs for less than 200 bucks. Some of which even support 1080p.
Finally, let’s have a look at something: a little less glamorous, but no less important. The humble flash drive, although you can still spend a pretty penny on one with the fastest speeds in the highest capacities. If you often need to move around lots of data, we typically take them for granted these days, they’re, given away as swag and promotional items, all the time at conferences and job fairs, and even if you do need to run out and buy one, you can find A perfectly functional drive, that’ll hold 32 gigabytes for less than ten dollars back in my day, etc. But when usb flash drives first appeared back in 2000, you could expect to pay a hundred bucks for 32 megabytes worth of capacity. Although 100 doesn’t sound like much compared to some of the insane prices, we discussed a couple minutes ago consider the 3.13 cost per megabyte at that price. A gigabyte’s worth of storage would have cost well over three thousand dollars now, fortunately, due to shrinking transistors and improvements in manufacturing, flash storage costs have plummeted to as low as around 10 cents per gigabyte on the consumer side. But are there other huge price drops that you think we missed? Let us know in the comments and keep your fingers crossed, that in a couple years we’ll be talking about how far gpu prices have fallen to so that they’re so low. Now that would be really great and speaking of things falling.
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You didn’t do it last time, i’m watching .