The iPhone made its debut exactly 10 years ago. Here’s how the original model compares to the 2017 “Blu R1 Plus,” perhaps the cheapest new-manufactured smartphone available in America today:
Screen size: 1) iPhone 3.5″ 2) Blu R1 5.5″
Screen resolution: 1) iPhone 320×480 2) Blu R1 720×1280
RAM: 1) iPhone 128 MB 2) Blu R1 3 GB
Storage: 1) iPhone 4 GB 2) Blu R1 32 GB
Camera: 1) iPhone 2 MP (only has one camera) 2) Blu R1 13 MP (main camera) and 5 MP (secondary camera)
Price: 1) iPhone $586 (inflation adjusted) 2) Blu R1 $160
I know it’s impossible to do a true quality comparison (i.e. – How much “better” is a phone with two cameras vs. a phone with only one?), but I’d approximate that today you could buy a smartphone that is five times “better” than the original iPhone overall, but it would cost you 75% less money than the iPhone cost ten years ago. That’s an overall cost-performance increase of 20x.
We take rapid advances in computing devices for granted, but this iPhone anniversary might be a good occasion to to put it into perspective. The peculiarity of this rate of improvement–which is made possible by Moore’s Law–is clear if we imagine it applied to other types of technology and other sectors of industry. For example, Motor Trend’s Car of the Year at the time the iPhone 1 went on sale was the 2007 Toyota Camry. At the time, a fully-loaded car of that type had an MSRP of $25,435. If Moore’s Law applied to cars, such a vehicle would be sold new today for $1,272–the same amount that someone getting paid the federal minimum wage earns in a month. (Note: In reality, the average price for a used 2007 Camry with typical mileage is $7,000)
Alternatively, we could imagine improvements happening in the inverse manner, with the Camry’s price staying fixed (perhaps increasing only with monetary inflation), but its performance specs improving by a factor of 20 (prepare for Tongue-In-Cheek Mode). In that case, a 2017 Camry would cost $29,876, get 5,360 horsepower (equivalent to a larger-than-average turboprop airplane engine), have a max speed of Mach 3.64, and get 440 – 620 mpg (depending on your driving habits, of course). Getting into accidents at Mach speeds would be devastating, though if a way were found to also make the Camry 20 times safer, it might even out.
And there are other possibilities still. What if the cost of building structures today were 1/20th what it was in 2007? How many more skyscrapers and mansions would there be? What if the cost of clean energy had declined by the same? What if planes had gotten 20 times faster? What if the cost of sending humans into space had tanked?
The iPhone and smartphones more broadly speaking have been one of the most important technologies of the last 50 years, and they have massively improved over the last ten. These thought experiments are meant to illustrate the magnitude of that improvement, but to also show that–however great they were–there any number of ways the world would have been better off had that same rate of cost-performance increase happened to other technologies. You may love your iPhone, but would you be better off with a 2006 clamshell phone plus a mansion, or plus almost free ground transportation, or plus the ability to fly anywhere on Earth in less than an hour?
Links
- http://www.pwc.ca/en/engines/pw100-pw150
- http://www.techradar.com/news/iphone-1-vs-iphone-7-plus-this-is-how-far-weve-come-in-10-years