A Miracle of the Market

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I just bought a 4 GB memory stick for $10. Buying it made me think of my first large storage purchase, a 10 MB drive for my Tandy 1000 that cost me $500. If I am calculating correctly, the cost of 1 MB of memory has dropped from $50 to 1/4 cent (and that's in a much more flexible form in the contemporary case). The price has dropped by a factor of 20,000.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:40 AM

    Another interesting fall in prices is reflected in the $60-$80-ish prices of VHS in the 1980s and the current $18-ish price of DVDs now.

    Disregarding rise in quality, we still find prices to have fallen by more than 75%. Were there a numerical way of measuring video and sound quality (there might be), then who knows how much of a price fall we have seen with respect to the same level of quality.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Avram9:37 AM

    You are being unfair, the market is even better at lowering digital storage costs than you say. Calculate based on non-portable storage i.e hard disks. You'll find a 2TB drive costs you as little as $100

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jonathan Finegold Catalán10:50 PM

    That miracle came at the expense of the enslaved industrial worker.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah4:48 AM

    Good point, Avram -- that is why I noted the portability of my memory stick.

    ReplyDelete

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