A $10k Electronic Device for a Penny?
A $10k Electronic Device for a Penny?
Robert Harley
Back in 1979, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan (Steely Dan) wanted to store drum sounds in solid-state memory. Their long-time engineer, the great Roger Nichols, set about to build such a system. The problem was that in those days, memory capacity was limited relative to the requirements of full-bandwidth digital audio.
Nichols nonetheless found someone who could supply him with one megabyte (1MB) of memory, and the two agreed to meet in the San Francisco airport to make the transaction. Both men showed up carrying duffle bags; the seller’s contained multiple large boards populated with row upon row of memory chips, and Nichol’s bag contained bundles of hundred-dollar bills. Nichols flew back to L.A. content that his $10,000 for 1MB of memory was well spent.
I thought of this story, told to me by Nichols himself many years ago, as I upgraded the memory in my PC. I bought two 1GB memory cards, and paid $11.99 each for them. For the sake of mathematical simplicity, we’ll call it $10 for 1GB of memory. As I was about to install the boards in my PC, it struck me that what Nichols paid $10,000 for thirty years ago now cost just one penny. Looked at another way, 1GB would have cost ten million dollars in 1979 —a price differential of one million times.
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Comments
Funny how that goes. In a related vein I recall a few years ago at the CEDIA conference, flat panel makers considering the threshold for mass-marketplace acceptance to be $100 per inch. At that time fifty inch plasmas were often in excess of $12K or more. I don't need to do the math because I'm now seeing 42-inch flat panels under a thousand bucks.
Neil Gader Associate Editor The Absolute Sound
Great perspective on how we get more, for less money, in many ways these days.
There is of course a flip side to it, though:
The pain (remorse?) one sometimes feels when the gear one bought a few years ago for $5k is worth a tenth that, now, and that $5k could buy so more much, today.
I'm thinking in particular of my beloved Sony Pearl (VPL VW50) -- a great projecter in its day, a price-performance leader, but now roundly surpassed in terms of performance by projectors costing considerably less.
In general, though, I try to get around that feeling often by:
1) Reminding myself of the enjoyment I got in the interim. (Sure glad I didn't put that money in the stock market!)
2) And by trying to buy "used" gear for slower changing technology (eg, amplifiers versus video projectors), where someone else has taken the depreciation hit.
But on balance, I think we all benefit more than we are harmed by the advances / price process you describe, so long as we make any purchase with the knowledge of what the future holds.
I am surely looking forward to buying a pair of mbl 101 Xtremes for a dime in 30 years when i retire, which at this rate, will be about what is left of my retirement savings. ;-)
Nathan is right that this massive cost reduction is a double-edged sword. I also bought a Sony VPL-VW50 projector, and at the time, someone who had bought a Qualia 004 for $35k when it first came out remarked that he could have waited and bought the VPL-VW50 for the interest on the $35k. The VPL-VW50 doesn't have as good a light source as the Qualia, but the SXRD panels are better in the VPL-VW50.
I've gotten lots of enjoyment from my VPL-VW50, and it continues to deliver great service. Incidentally, replacing the bulb gave the picture new life.