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Comment by peaseagee | Hacker News Reader

That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?

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Repairing grandfather clocks isn't more expensive now because it's gotten any harder; it's because the popularity of grandfather clocks is basically nonexistent compared to anything else to tell time.

Doesn't need to be any particular reason to disprove the notion that technology only gets cheaper.

"repairing a unique clock" getting costlier doesn't mean technology hasn't gotten cheaper.

check out whether clocks have gotten cheaper in general. the answer is that it has.

there is no economy of scale here in repairing a single clock. its not relevant to bring it up here.

Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.

Luxury watches have gone up, 'clocks' as a technology is cheaper than ever.

You can buy one for 90 cents on temu.

The landing cost for that 90 cent watch has gone way up. Shipping and to some degree taxes has pushed the price higher.

that's not the technology

of course it's silly to talk about manufacturing methods and yield and cost efficiency without having an economy to embed all of this into, but ... technology got cheaper means that we have practical knowledge of how to make cheap clocks (given certain supply chains, given certain volume, and so and so)

we can make very cheap very accurate clocks that can be embedded into whatever devices, but it requires the availability of fabs capable of doing MEMS components, supply materials, etc.

not true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT.

You can't account for inflation because the price increase is inflation.

this is not true

you can look at a basket of goods that doesn't have your specific product and compare directly

but inflation is the general price level increase, this can be used as a deflator to get the price of whatever product in past/future money amount to see how the price of the product changed in "real" terms (ie. relative to the general price level change)

You cannot verify anything using a tool that cannot validate truth.

Instead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc.

No. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies.

Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life.

These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments.

okay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge?

https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen...

You will get a different bridge. With very different technology. Same as "I can't repair my grandfather clock cheaply".

In general, there are several things that are true for bridges that aren't true for most technology:

* Technology has massively improved, but most people are not realizing that. (E.g. the Bay Bridge cost significantly more than the previous version, but that's because we'd like to not fall down again in the next earthquake) * We still have little idea how to reason about the cost of bridges in general. (Seriously. It's an active research topic) * It's a tiny market, with the major vendors forming an oligopoly * It's infrastructure, not a standard good * The buy side is almost exclusively governments.

All of these mean expensive goods that are completely non-repeatable. You can't build the same bridge again. And on top of that, in a distorted market.

But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time.

> But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time.

Even if you adjust for inflation?

Depends, do we care about TCO? Also, can I pick the set of bridges I compare?

OK, kidding aside: If you deeply care, you can probably mine the Federal Highway Administration's bridge construction database: https://fhwaapps.fhwa.dot.gov/upacsp/tm?transName=MenuSystem...

I don't think the question is answerable in a meaningful way. Bridges are one-off projects with long life spans, comparing cost over time requires a lot of squinting just so.

This seems largely the same as any other technology. The prices of new technologies go down initially as we scale up and optimize it's production, but as soon as demand fades, due to newer technology or whatever, the cost of that technology goes up again.

Bought any RAM lately? Phone? GPU in the last decade?

The latest iphone has gone down in price? It's double. I guess the marketing is working.

"Pens are not cheaper, look at this Montblanc" is not a good faith response.

'84 Motorola DynaTAC - ~$12k AfI (adjusted for inflation)

'89 MicroTAC ~$8k AfI

'96 StarTAC ~$2k AfI

`07 iPhone ~$673 AfI

The current average smartphone sells for around $280. Phones are getting cheaper.

Phones, or smartphones?

I purchased a 5T drive in 2019 and the price is higher now despite newer better drives going on the market since.

Not much has down in price over the last few years.

Price volatility exists.

Meanwhile the overall price of storage has been going down consistently: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.

Or riding in an uber?

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