In the beginning, mobile phones were just a walkie-talkie. iPhones have the same capabilities of 13 distinct electronics gadgets worth more than $3,000 in a 1991.
An iPhone incorporates a computer, CD player, phone, and video camera, among other items.
In 1991, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost around $10,000. Today, it costs around four cents.
Back in 1991, a gigabyte of flash memory, which is what the iPhone uses, would have cost something like $45,000, or more. (Today, it’s around 55 cents ($0.55).)
The mid-level iPhone 5S has 32 GB of flash memory. Thirty-two GB, multiplied by $45,000, equals $1.44 million.
The iPhone used 20,500 millions of instructions per second which in 1991 would have cost around $620,000.
In 1991, a mobile phone used the AMPS analog wireless network to deliver kilobit voice connections.
A 1.44 megabit T1 line from the telephone company cost around $1,000 per month.
Today’s LTE mobile network is delivering speeds in the 15 Mbps range.
Safe to say, the iPhone’s communication capacity is at least 10,000 times that of a 1991 mobile phone.
The 1991 cost of mobile communication was something like $100 per kilobit per second.
Fifteen thousand Kbps (15 Mbps), multiplied by $100, is $1.5 million.
Considering only memory, processing, and broadband communications power, duplicating the iPhone back in 1991 would have (very roughly) cost: $1.44 million + $620,000 + $1.5 million = $3.56 million.
This doesn’t even account for the MEMS motion detectors, the camera, the iOS operating system, the brilliant display, or the endless worlds of the Internet and apps to which the iPhone connects us.
via Techpolicy Daily and Cafe Hayek
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