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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
