Blog Post

AEIdeas

The computer package displayed above (computer, monitor, keyboard and printer) sold at Best Buy in 1994 for $1,998, as featured in its weekly flyer and shown recently on the Twister Sifter website (“This Best Buy Flyer from 1994 Shows How Fast Technology Has Changed“). In today’s dollars, that computer package would cost $3,225 (and very expensive by today’s standards) and would offer performance that would be considered quite primitive by today’s standards. For example, Best Buy is currently advertising a Dell Inspiron 23.8″ Touch-Screen All-In-One computer for only $650 (without a printer), with about 1,400 times more hard disk space (1TB vs. 720MB) and 2,000 times more memory (8GB vs. 4MB) as the 1994 Compaq.

In 1994, Best Buy was selling notebook computers for about $2,600 and $3,300 (pictured above), which would be more than $4,000 in today’s dollars for the one on the left and more than $5,000 in today’s dollars for the one on the right. Today, Best Buy offers more than a dozen different laptop computers for less than $200, (one even as low as $150) with performance, speed and disk storage that are “light years” ahead of the 1994 notebooks, including 1,000 times more memory (4GB vs. 4MB).

Bottom Line: In just the last several decades, computer technologies have advanced so significantly, that you can spend $200 today for a basic laptop computer that has performance standards that are almost infinitely better than the notebooks available in 1994 that cost more than $5,000 (in 2016 dollars). You can get computers today with thousands of times more memory, speed, performance and disk storage space than computers in the mid-1990s at a fraction of the price.

And yet don’t we hear all the time from Bernie Sanders and other progressives that all of the economic gains over the last 20 years have gone only to the top 1% of Americans? Well, the top 1% can afford a laptop computer whether it costs $5,000 or $200. But it’s the poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans who benefit the most from the technological advances, economic progress, and the “miracle of the market” that now deliver $200 laptops.