That computing power has been getting cheaper over time is of course something people know. But it’s really staggering when you see it staring you in the face. Here’s an amusing story about buying an Apple IIe to use as a Twitter terminal:
Actually the story begins another week or two earlier at the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market. I came across a guy with a bunch of Apple II computers stacked up and ended up buying an Apple //e and a disk drive for $20. His prices were $10 for an Apple //e and $25 for an Apple II+. The Apple II+ is technically the lesser machine – an earlier model that lacked the features of the Apple //e but is more expensive due to scarcity. The computer my parents purchased for me was the original Apple II, an even older and more rare model. I asked him if he had any of that model and he said no, but if he did they’d run a few hundred dollars.
The $798 price of the board-only Apple IIe 1980 dollars, by contrast, would be over $2,000 today—less than one percent of the contemporary price, despite the scarcity issue.
This is context that I think needs to be kept in mind when people talk about, for example, the growing share of the economy dedicated to providing health care services. The different sectors need to sum up to 100 percent of GDP and some stuff gets much cheaper thanks to technological progress. In part, that leads us to buy more and more of it—and we certainly buy a lot more computing power than we did 30 years ago. But in part it means that a bigger share of the economy winds up going to other things, like health care.
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