I was just thinking in the back of my head about how cheap LEDs have made types of lighting that would’ve cost way too much (both to install, and in electricity usage) no longer stupidly expensive.
For example, I noticed on Amazon some cheap furniture that has LEDs/power outlets sort of integrated right into them. Looks pretty cyberpunk-ish to my eyes. And I know years ago that sort of thing would’ve been marked up to high heavens.
Fancy lighting in general has changed drastically in price/design.
So…what are some things, due to changes in demand or changes in tech or changes in anything…that would’ve been really expensive back in the day, but which no longer seem to be, making them more frugal than they used to be?
International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.
Don’t call me before 9pm my friend!
Ugh, or how about the friends you couldn’t text because they had to pay to read incoming SMS.
long distance domestic phone call
What’s that?
In the pre- cellphone era, you would pay for telephone calls by the minute, and you would be charged a different rate if you called someone who lived out of your area. Like, a different rate per minute to talk to them? (I’m an Elder Millenial, so I grew up hearing about this stuff but didn’t live with it in my adult life, I just vaguely remember the adult freak-outs about unsanctioned long distance calls…always due to the impending huge telephone bill you’d get for it.) My point being, companies like AT&T (Ma Bell) had an utter stranglehold on telecommunications and would make you pay out the nose to call someone out of your area in the same country, and international calls were even steeper.
This was an age where the telephone company monopoly was so bad that they were forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government to force competition and a better market for consumers. (Imagine if, say, Amazon, was forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
In the digital age, I can basically call someone in the next room as cheaply as I can call someone in Australia. (Speaking from a USA pov.) One of the few things that’s better in the 2020s is how easy/cheap it is to call people now. (And text, and email, etc.)
I grew up in that era. I’ll add that, the area code of your telephone number was dictated by where you lived. You could only make “free” calls (included in your monthly bill) to the same area code. Different area codes were considered long distance and incurred a per-minute additional charge. I had friends and relatives that lived an hour away, but calling them was considered “long distance”. Given the price of gas at the time, it could be cheaper to drive to them to have a long conversation.
Another “world” we no longer have is the age of “collect call” and “calling cards”. Collect calls meant you were calling someone, but they accept paying the charges. This was often used if you had to call someone from a payphone and didn’t have money. Or, you had to call your parents long distance from your friend’s phone and didn’t want to charge it to them.
Then there’s the “calling card”. These allowed you to pre-pay for calls. You used to be able to buy a card at gas stations, drug stores, etc. that had prepaid domestic and long distance minutes on it. You’d call the number on the card first, enter the card info, then enter the telephone number you were calling. When you ran out of minutes, it would just hang up. Sometimes a voice would come onto the line and warn you that your time was almost up.
House phones were a great source of entertainment in the 80s. If you dialed zero, you were connected with a live operator you could prank. There was no caller id, so just dialing random numbers to prank was fun. Always in the same area code though. Otherwise your parents would get a charge on the bill at the end of the month and you’d be toast.
House phones were a great source of entertainment in the 80s.
I never experienced this myself, but your comment here reminded me that in rural areas, some people’s homes would be on a “party line”. Meaning, one phone number for several houses, and I guess all the phones in all the houses on the party line would ring if it was called? And neighbors could just pick up their handset quietly and listen into calls and snoop and get gossip that way if the people talking didn’t watch what they said over the phone?
And even in homes that had their own dedicated number, you could quietly lift any phone handset in the house and listen in. If you were careful the other people talking would never know someone else was listening in.
I never experienced the “party line”, but having my parents or brother try to eavesdrop my calls by picking up another handset was a constant problem. I remember me and friends pausing or conversation at the slightest click noise on the line in fear someone was listening.
Later, when we got our first home computer and modem, my new problem was people picking up a handset while I was connected via modem. It would kill my connection every time. I used to get so pissed.
Then there’s the “calling card”. These allowed you to pre-pay for calls. You used to be able to buy a card at gas stations, drug stores, etc. that had prepaid domestic and long distance minutes on it
These calling cards are also the format that SIM cards are based on. It could store contact names and phone numbers (and most SIM cards still support this, although it’s largely deprecated for smart phones) so you’d have a contact list ready to go.
If it’s okay to go waaaaay back: salt. It’s always mind-blowing to me that people all over europe during the medieval age or even before that couldn’t season anything with salt cause it often was as expensive as gold itself. If I imagine those huge amounts of salt if you wanna pickle some meat or fish. Today salt costs nearly nothing, nearly everybody can afford it and it’s so basic that some even don’t consider it “seasoning” at all.
Aluminium once was way more expensive than gold. That’s why the top of the obelisk in Washington is made from aluminum.
I imagine those beside the ocean must have figured out what happens when boiling sea water. But I guess it was scaling it that was an issue?
Tons of English phrases and words have salty origins, like salary.
Yeah, the scaling and transportation. If you wanted salt near the alps it was expensive as hell and mostly the salt came from mines, but that was a very difficult task.
Salary comes from salty? Like in a good way? I know an old “word” for salt in German is “weißes Gold” (white gold).
Sal is latin (and also French to this day) for salt. Salary referred originally to the amount of salt you received as payment.
In other romantic languages too! like portuguese
There are no ancient sources stating that salary was literal salt bring handed to roman soldiers, I believe the current best theory is that it was “money for salt” that was given to soldiers.
I always used to figure a decent desktop computer would cost me between $2k and $3k. That’s going back to the early 90s. But even though the value of a dollar has plummeted since then, you can get a decent desktop for significantly less, maybe half.
I was able to build a desktop capable of 4k60 for around $1500, and I overbuilt in places. You can definitely do okay at $1000 or less if you’re aiming for lower resolutions these days.
Yep, for sure. And you can get a serviceable system for closer to $500, though you aren’t going to pay high end games.
Where do you source cheap parts? Maybe its a Canada thing, but things are still not cheap in my experience
Microcenter is the gold standard for cheap PC parts, but they don’t sell much online and they have very limited locations.
Beyond that, Newegg and amazon will have sales quite frequently that make a budget builds possible.
In the US $500 might get you a decent office desktop, but I would say to expect closer to $800 minimum for a PC with a dedicated gpu.
FYI, Newegg got sold to some company a few years back and is no longer the geek nirvana it once was. So YMMV if you use it. It can still be good, it’s just not as central as it used to be to computer geekdom.
Yeah RIP tigerdirect and old Newegg.
B&H has been a good experience, but their pricing tends to be a bit high with only a handful of good deals.
There’s no consistently great place to buy pc components online as far as I’m aware. Amazon is rife with sketchy sellers, Newegg will sell you damaged goods and blame you on the return, best buy hides/mislabels specs, and everywhere else is expensive.
Dude I’m still salty that CompUSA merged into TigerDirect right around the time TigerDirect got sketchy
For those really cheap ones, you’re probably talking prefab - hard to complete with them on the low end last I looked (which, admittedly, has been some years). Things like this.
TVs are very cheap now. The 40" Samsung LCD in my basement cost $1,200 fifteen years ago. It will soon be replaced by a 43" Samsung 4K TV that costs under $300.
DVD players used to cost $500+ and are now practically free.
I pay $15/month for xbox game pass and have access to hundreds of games. I don’t own them but I can if I want to.
TVs are cheap now because viewers are the product. From what I’ve heard, “dumb” TVs and other high end displays (PC monitors, TVs designed for business and education use, medical imaging displays, etc.) are still rather expensive
I’ve noticed how cheap TVs are. I was thinking of getting one for like the first time in decades and I got sort of reverse sticker shock at how much screen you can get for so cheap a price.
Hand in hand with that, there’s a lot more marketing gobbledy-removed out there trying to upsell schmucks on features that are only marginally better, probably because basic large TVs are so cheap now. So they try hard to get people to upgrade more frequently than needed, or to get features that probably won’t make one iota of a difference in the viewing experience, just to sell more units/pricier units.
Yep, our newest TV is about 8 years old and the only thing we would get from this years model is slightly better picture quality.
Our first colour tv cost about 3 months of my dad’s salary in the early 1970s. And the Siemens mainframe computer in the company he worked for was tens of thousands (which was more than a year’s worth of the average salary). Rent. Every month. It had less computing power than my smartphone.
If you want to go way back, books were a huge investment. Before the printing press, each one was hand copied, which took countless hours for each one. Like, one book could be comparable in to the cost of a house.
now they’re free on Anna’s archive, what a world
Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.
When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.
UNIX
AT&T, IBM, and a few others used to charge tens of thousands of dollars for it but Berkeley and Linus Torvalds both created kernels that didn’t use any of their code and pushed UNIX into a very niche market while open source UNIX derivatives took over the market. This is vastly over simplified but UNIX now has open source derivatives that anyone can use, modify, or distribute.
Along those same lines, I would say LCD monitors and TVs. Obviously they are not “cheap” as in pocket change, but they are an order of magnitude less than when the tech was introduced.
Also computer storage, e.g. SSD drives and SD cards. (Although maybe it’s cheating to cite anything related to Moore’s Law.)
Storage is cheaper than it was before, but it’s still quite expensive. 4TB SSDs are simply out of my budget, and even the higher tier of mechanical drives are really expensive
This is a proportional interpretation. The cost of data storage has absolutely plumetted since, say, 1990.
4TB SSDs are simply out of my budget
They’re $200-$300 on Amazon atm.
You can get 512gb for $30 though, which boggles me.
When SSDs were new, I paid about $350 for a mere 250gb SSD.
The significantly increased in price this year as SSD companies are reducing production due to lower demands.
FYI the cheaper LEDs and usb power outlets are all disposable quality. Prices on the high quality stuff are coming down because of the downward force of cheap shit, but the really cheap shit is cheap because it’s shit.
Any brand suggestions?
Phillips bulbs are like 10x an LED bulb from Walmart but I’ve gone through 10x the bulbs and my Phillips are still trucking.
On a recent trip to Walmart (I live in a rural area so limited retail options) I noticed they now have 3 different tiers of LEDs. 3 year, 5 year and 10 year. So they really have this whole lifespan thing for the LEDs down to a science
Again, I would avoid Walmart and just commit to better LEDs. Phillips are rated for 25k hours / 25 years.
That not really true, it’s cheap because manufacturing is a solved problem and incredibly easy to exceed the requirements.
It’s cheaper for those reasons.
Cheap shit on Temu, Amazon, and AliExpress is cheap because it’s shit.
It’s often things made with exactly the same machines and materials as all the others on the market, that’s what a solved problem is.
You can spend $80 for something in a nice box where the distributor is run by people who own yachts or an identical thing straight from the factory.
Often it is, and often it isn’t. Sometimes the same manufacturing facility will have different quality standards for different buyers, and the distributors run by people who own yachts will not accept the same level of defects as the others. Name brands have to stand by their products and provide warranties, because their name is supposed to mean something. Random shell companies that exist only to sell knock-off products don’t care if your charger stops working in 6 months.
I’m not suggesting you have to buy name brand shit, because in practice those companies have demonstrated that they aren’t as committed to quality as one would hope. But if you’re buying an $80 Samsung product for $25 from Symsnug Ltd, you have a much higher chance of throwing it away.
True to an extent and for certain products but if you’re buying an 80$ Samsung USB hub instead of a 5 dollar straight from the factory generic then you just spent 75 bucks on adverts, ceo bonuses, and graphic design.
SD cards I only buy from big names for the reason you mention but the machines can trace and solder at far higher precision than is needed for most electronics.
It depends on what you’re doing with the usb hub, but yeah. With that price differential, you can buy two so that when one breaks, you have a spare. At $5, they are disposable. That was my point in the first place. There are a lot of things that can fail on a usb hub, from the board being poorly printed, the solder points being weak, the fuses or caps failing at a higher rate, or the power supply giving inconsistent voltage. And if it’s built into your Generic Lay-Z-Bro gaming recliner, it will likely be a removed to replace.
It’s often things made with exactly the same machines and materials as all the others on the market
It’s worth noting that for items where quality can vary factories will typically bin the output products. Better quality into the bin going to this expensive brand, worst quality goes straight to Temu, lowest quality that meets Walmart’s standards goes in this bin, etc.
For anything where the silicon quality really matters you want to bear this in mind. TVs, and LEDs are the biggest ones where the silicon part makes light for you to look at and the quality can make a big difference
Edit to add: cheap no name chargers are a great way to spend several hundred dollars replacing your phone because you wanted to save $5 on a charger/cable. Personally I don’t gamble with phone chargers, and you can get a good, high speed USB-PD charger for $20 now so it’s really not worth the risk. Heck I got my 3 port name brand GaN USB-PD charger for $35 so the bottom is really not worth racing for now
Embedded computers.
It used to be that everything got a custom or at least customized circuit board, and fancy wifi or Bluetooth functionality, or smarter programmable features would make that really expensive.Recently, the cost of embeddable system on a chip setups has dropped low enough that it’s typically cheaper to put more computer power then you need in a device than to make something custom.
It’s why everything has wi-fi and Bluetooth now. It’s cheaper to use the prefab piece, and those all come with that build in, so you may as well advertise it.
Digital calipers. I have a pair of high quality Mitutoyo calipers from a long time ago that cost $250 and some from eBay more recently that cost $15. Honestly the $15 ones are nowhere near as good, but definitely usable. I’m assuming some in say the $50 range could be just as good as my expensive ones.
Not too terribly long ago, clothing was super expensive. Like, make a dress from burlap or old feed sacks instead of buying something expensive. Some companies that sold feed and seed would print floral patterns on the sacks because they knew customers would turn the old sacks into clothing for their children.
Lots of old cars. You can get 80s and 90s Rolls Royce for very cheap from private sellers. Some late 70s / early 80s Ferraris (like the 308) can be had for under $10k.
Mind you, they’re still incredibly expensive to maintain and thus not terribly practical, but the cost to entry can be far lower than most would think.
Where do you look for stuff like that?
Tbh I see quite a few on the regular using local Craigslist.
I love the fact you used LEDs as part of your post, because they themselves perfectly fit the topic of the post. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, LEDs were almost prohibitively expensive. I can remember consumer LEDs in like '92 being over $2 a piece, which is a lot if you compare to today when you can get programmable RGB LEDs for less than a nickle a piece.
I remember paying 5DM for a single blue LED. Which would be about 6 or 7 Euro adjusted for inflation.
I once paid a good months income for 16MB of RAM for my computer. Which put me into the category “the private home computer that has more RAM than all the companies’ servers together”.
I once paid several hundred DM for 16 KB of RAM for my ZX81. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
I skirted the ZX81. I had a self-built computer and a TI99A before and a C64 after that.
