by gbear605 14 hours ago
Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
A technology doodad getting 25% cheaper in real terms over 15-20 years is about as far opposite as you can get from a hefty price drop.
Sure, it hasn’t crashed like the prices of televisions, or like computers did in the 80s and 90s. But it’s still meaningfully cheaper and of course much more capable (the original iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store!).
Come on, the iPhone had:
- no app store
- no video recording at all
- no copy/paste function
- no selfie camera
- no GPS
And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
It took about three years to get all the features in your bulleted list. It's been another fifteen and a half years since.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
It's also 10000% more capable too.
Sure, but new computers are 100,000x more capable and 1/10th the cost. If we look back far enough, it's 1/100th the cost. We could do better.
And OP wants a model that's somewhat less than a 10000% improvement.
$499 with carrier subsidy too
It didn't take much longer to get a 3G for that price with no subsidy.