PC Hardware and Monitor Prices - Historical comparisons?

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  apsilon on 20/02/2021 - 13:40

  +2

  one day, not sure when, a $3,500 monitor with these specs will probably cost $350….

  Of course it will. Tech gets better and cheaper all the time. I paid $1700 for a 17" CRT monitor probably around 1990 and $400 for a 5.25" floppy drive a decade before that and both are basically worthless now. By comparison I paid about $1000 for my current 40" 4k monitor and about $450 for a 4TB SSD.

  • 

    huggsymersh on 20/02/2021 - 17:35

    $1.7k for a CRT in 1990 yikes. Although to be fair that is 30 years ago. Yikes again!

    I guess I'm just curious. But I'm also thinking of getting a monitor to replace one that is perfectly fine, but slightly out of date, so thinking about that purchase in the wider landscape of tech improvements. Thinking about the relentless pace of tech improvements as well as price drops makes me feel not so bad about splurging a little, and makes me appreciate that price is constantly changing, but the most useful measure of value is whether or not you'll make use of whatever piece of tech you buy.

• 

  scrimshaw on 20/02/2021 - 13:43

  +5

  Parts.PDF msy archived on the wayback machine would give you a lot of information about how much (or how little) things cost back in the day.

  https://web.archive.org/web/20161009234121/http://cdn.msy.co…

  And some older archives
  https://goughlui.com/2014/02/04/tech-flashback-the-unintenti…

  The PG35VQ you mentioned is likely going to be obsolete within 2 years, maybe three years from now. FALD (full array local area dimming) is pretty expensive to implement and it makes the monitor super-thicc because the individual LED's (there's 512 of them) that provide the 1000-nit back-lightning suck a ton of power AND also require active cooling (i.e there's a spinning fan in there to keep things cool, and moving parts will make noise, get blocked by dust and is another point of failure).

  This sort of tech would eventually be replaced by Micro LED panels which would make this sort of implementation look like cave drawings by comparison. The problem is that they are pretty difficult to manufacture so it's likely a equivalent 35-inch super-high-end gaming monitor will probably cost just as much.

  • 

    huggsymersh on 20/02/2021 - 16:42

    That's brilliant, thank you.

    The earliest MSY pdf went back to 2005. Which is a long time in tech (and our collective lives) but still very relatable.

    $1000 for a 20.1” BENQ FP2091 -16ms DVI

    https://mobilespecs.net/monitor/BenQ/BenQ_FP2091.html

    Love it! Interesting to know the original price of what you can sometimes see on hard rubbish.

• 

  Twix on 20/02/2021 - 14:11

  +2

  Search for any PC part to see pricing up to 2 years back @ PCPartPicker

  Asus ROG SWIFT PG35VQ
  Trends
  Price drops in the last 24 hours

• 

  Gnostikos on 20/02/2021 - 17:03

  I wrote something in an old comment about how now probably the worst time in the last 15 years for PC enthusiasts in terms of affordability, choice and consumer purchasing power.

  Moore's law is definitively dead and Intel/Nvidia/AMD see little reason to truly innovate in the desktop/PC market because of planned obsolescence, mobile computing dominating their R&D budget and their intense pressure to migrate as much client-side processing to cloud-based platforms as possible so they can turn all of their products into monthly or annual services to rake in that reoccurring $ub$cription revenue.

  We are definitely paying a lot more for the same level of performance than we were back in 2010 for example (especially in Australia with our world-famous regional tax) and the OEMs are quite comfortable sitting on their asses pumping mediocre 5-10% inter-generational improvements in hardware each year while incrementally jacking up the cost of everything to astronomical levels as time goes by.