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If you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more performance for the same power expenditure are just very different than back in the day.

There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.

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In 1998 to transfer a megabyte over telephone lines was expensive and 5 years later is was almost free.

I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down, on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.

But why not measure $ per intelligence. In 2020 you'd need a billion dollars to get your computer to write good code, now it is practically free.

In 1998, 16 MiB of RAM was ~$200, in 2025, 16 GiB of ram is about $50. A Pentium II in 1998 at 459 MHz was $600. Today, a AMD Ryzen 7 9800X can be had for $500. That Ryzen is maybe 100 times as powerful as the Pentium II. What's available at what price point has changed, but it's ridiculous how much computing I can get for $150 at Best Buy, and it's also ridiculous how little I can do with that much computing power. Wirth’s law still holds: software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.

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