Cost of iPhone X in 1957
This comparison seems fairly fantastical and irrelevant. Something from within the history of consumer electronics would be more useful to consider, in my opinion.<p>For example, in 1982, the wildly popular low-end home entertainment computer, the Commodore 64, was released at $595, or about $1500 after inflation adjustment. On release in 1977, the Apple II was $1298, or over $5000 in today&#x27;s terms. You could pay $400 per 4k of ram, so $6000 if you wanted one with 12k ram.  If the iPhone X came out in 1985 for this price, it would have been $400 in 1982 dollars, or 40% of the C64 - with over 4 million times the storage capacity, to say nothing of the other capabilities.<p>That our modern mobile devices are popularly called &#x27;phones&#x27; misses the point that they are used as general purpose computing devices, not primarily phones or even necessarily primarily for communication. They are also GPS navigators, cameras, calculators, recipe files, photo albums, alarm clocks, book readers, walkmans, home stereos, encyclopedias, wallets, and a lot more.  People used to frequently pay decent sums to buy dedicated devices to perform many of those services.