More Apple for the day

Joe McKendrick has a SmartPlanet article about the unexpected cost of an iPhone:

Today's typical smartphone replaces a wide range of equipment one could have purchased back in the early 1990s, from computers to stereo equipment to cameras to clock radios. And, oh yeah, telephones.
Now, Bret Swanson of TechPolicyDaily.com has crunched some of the pricing behind these replaced items and more, coming up with an estimate as to what it would have cost to put together a high-functioning smartphone in 1991, comparable to today's iPhone: nearly four million dollars, versus the one hundred to three hundred dollar price tag (depending on deals) incurred when purchased with one of today's mobile plans. This reflects the incredible advances in the availability and relative costs of technology in just two decades.
Here is Swanson's breakdown of costs, if one were to attempt to build a smartphone back in 1991:

Memory: Up to $1.44 million for the typical 32 gigabytes of memory an iPhone holds. "In 1991, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost around $10,000," Swanson points out. "Today, it costs around four cents." Plus, 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. The mid-level iPhone 5S has 32 GB of flash memory. Thirty-two GB, multiplied by $45,000, equals $1.44 million."
Processor: A decent in-phone processor comparable to today's power would have cost $620,000. In 1991, a PC using the 80486SX processor at the time (yielding about 16.5 millions of instructions per second, or MIPS) might have cost $3,000, Swanson says. "The Apple A7... outpaces that leading edge desktop PC processor by a factor of 1,242. In 1991, the price per MIPS was something like $30. So 20,500 MIPS in 1991 would have cost around $620,000."
Network connectivity and bandwidth: At least $1.5 million. In 1991, a mobile phone connection (for basic communications) was about a hundred dollars per kilobit per second. The iPhone communications capacity is at least ten thousand times what it was for a mobile phone in 1991.
Swanson also had an interesting follow-up observation to his calculations: you can't make policy based on technology that quickly gets outmoded, or accelerates to new heights of adoption. By doing so, "we close off entire pathways to amazing innovation."

Rico says he's happy his phone is so cheap...