The Amazing Wealth Machine

How much is that smartphone really worth? Phil and Stephen discuss multiple analyses.

Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone

We’ll get to those someday, but today, something much simpler. The back page of the front section on Saturday, February 16, 1991 was 4/5ths covered with a Radio Shack ad.

There are 15 electronic gizmo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.

How much would an iPhone have cost in 1991?

Innovation blindness, I’ve long argued, is a key obstacle to sound economic and policy thinking. And this is a perfect example. When we make policy based on today’s technology, we don’t just operate mildly sub-optimally. No, we often close off entire pathways to amazing innovation.

The iPhone in Your Pocket Is Worth Millions

My iPhone 7 has 128 gigabytes (GB) of flash memory, which would have cost around $5.76 million back in 1991.

Do “They” Really Say “Technological Progress Is Slowing Down?”

Consider the 256 GB memory iPhone X: Implemented in vacuum tubes in 1957, the transistors in an iPhoneX alone would have:

• cost 150 trillion of today's dollars: one and a half times today's global annual product
• taken up a hundred-story square building 300 meters high, and 3 kilometers long and wide
• drawn 150 terawatts of power—30 times the world's current generating capacity

WT 375-686