At least, that’s how much it would have cost if a technology of this scale had been brought to market just 22 years ago!
Not to mention the fact that there’s no way this technology could have fit into a box the size of an iPhone “or even a refrigerator”, according to Bret Swanson, blogger at Techpolicydaily and author of the study.
And for good reason: each of the smartphone’s components has undergone incredible technological advances over the last few years, in order to meet consumers’ ever-increasing expectations and offer them exclusive functionalities.
Let’s take a look at what these components would have cost in 1991: the iPhone processor would have cost approximately 550,000 francs in 1991. In fact, 25,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) would have been needed for a smartphone’s processor, each of which would have cost around 21.5 francs.
What’s more, a PC using this kind of processor, such as Intel’s 80486SX (often used in Dell computers), would have cost around Fr 2,600. Memory, meanwhile, would have represented a colossal budget of around 1.28 million francs, due to the cost of a single gigabyte in 1991, i.e. 9,000 francs.
But a gigabyte of flash memory, which is what Apple uses, actually cost 40,000 francs!
And with the iPhone offering 32GB of flash memory, we’ll let you do the math… To this we must add the cost of communication, which would have come to around 1.30 million francs, the biggest item in this budget!
The communication capacity of an iPhone is more than 10,000 times greater than that of a telephone in 1991.
A single Kbps (kilobits per second) was worth 90 francs.
Today, the iPhone reaches 15 Mbps, or 15,000 Kbps!
That’s how we arrive at a cost of approximately 3 million francs for an iPhone in 1991!
But that’s not counting the many features that would have been hard to put a price on 22 years ago, such as motion sensors, cameras, touchscreen, OS, fingerprint reader and a host of other chips that enhance the everyday life of our connected generation.
