Just a quick comment that price comparisons from the past are more relevant when adjusted for inflation to current day currency values and, when possible, compared to a relevant indicator of other prices at the time (for example, the price of a car, median personal income, the cost of gasoline).
Yes. I am completely aware, and I deliberately chose to hone in on the 1996–2000 window for relative context of actual price drops at the same time features and performance of the entry-level Apple laptop escalated dramatically. I detail this following your next quote below.
Relatively speaking, the 1996–2000 window of pricing cannot really be contextualized in the same manner as, say, the window of 2019–2023. Actual prices
did fall, inflation-adjusted, with the former. For the latter, they flattened.
What’s happened instead, to keep owners of Macs coming back to the stores, has been to hard-bake in features which preventing extended life use (and use-value) of their products by locking out the means to: a) DIY upgrade; and b) continue with macOS builds beyond what Apple arbitrarily capped for a particular model. (Thankfully and mercifully, we have dosdude1 and OCLP to shatter those synthetic caps.)
What changed was the pace of packing in more features and performance all the while prices either dropped and/or flat pricing could be maintained. As we’ve come to know, performances
have improved, especially from the last Intel models compared against the first Silicon models, but the packing in of new
features has not.
One of of two ain’t bad, yes? Except, frankly, it isn’t when the extant features, such as ports, are also being removed, confining instant extensibility. And the workarounds, such as buying costly, proprietary, add-on dongles and Thunderbolt docking hub extensions, is a net-negative when such levels of extensibility were, as recently as 2016, integrated with the laptop.
Further, the locking down of the OS (as T2 and cryptography go), in aggregate, has taken away even more features — namely, the feature of the end user being able to fine-tune tailor their system in granular ways we once took for granted with with Mac OS and Mac OS X through, say, Snow Leopard (though the first hints of pulling back from that began to show itself with Leopard).
This presents a dwindling value proposition, but the
premiumization options of going up from the base model? Sure, but you will pay well and above for non-competitive RAM improvements and solid-state storage, as they’re soldered in. So does the company-driven imperative to compel existing customers to have to swap out whole machines if one wants to “““upgrade””” what they have currently.
We are led to believe these constitute an improvement of features. They are not.
A good US dollar inflation calculator:
What’s a dollar worth? How far does a past dollar stretch to equal the modern dollar? What would past prices be today?
www.minneapolisfed.org
Uh, all due respect, but you probably didn’t look at what I wrote
too closely. I did include one inflation-adjusted product price to compare it (the base model PowerBook 1400cs/117) with the 1999 price of the iBook G3, Rev A. And yes, I did use a U.S. inflation calculator to arrive at that inflation-adjusted figure to really drive home just how much prices fell in 30 months for a system which was maybe 2.5x or 3x a improvement in performance and features.
A fun way to compare global Big Mac prices:
en.wikipedia.org
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The 128k Macintosh, when released in 1984, cost $2,495 (or 1,560 Big Macs). That is $7,318 in 2023 dollars. The least expensive iMac today is $1,300 (or 228 Big Macs).
Yes, but this isn’t telling of anything profound.
We understand how fabrication techniques, transistor widths, and scaling up to manufacture many more units at lowered unit cost at that economy of scale ushered the tremendous drop in pricing — actual
and relative — between, say, 1984’s Macintosh 128K and, say, the Mac mini G4 or even the eMac, ca. 2005. With that plummeting in prices over time (a downward vector on a line graph) came an escalation in both performance and also features integrated into the product (as two upward vectors on the same line graph).
These days, the first vector would be fairly flat for the base model. The second, performance, would be a gentle upward angle, post-M1, while the third, features, have slipped gently these last ten years as more ports and functions were removed and/or soldered; components became locked down via cryptographic matching; and base specs have, at best, held flat.
It’s… a disappoint. Not a disappointment, but a disappoint. :<