Enterprise products with sufficient market share and "stickiness", will not.
For historical precedent, see the commercial practices of Oracle, Microsoft, Vmware, Salesforce, at the height of their power.
The software is free (citation: Cuda, nvcc, llvm, olama/llama cpp, linux, etc)
The hardware is *not* getting cheaper (unless we're talking a 5+ year time) as most manufacturers are signaling the current shortages will continue ~24 months.
If you factor in the cost of integration and ongoing maintenance - by humans or llms - it is not free. But it certainly has never been cheaper.
Yes, that's the time I'm talking about.
You also had a blip with increasing hard disk prices when Thailand flooded a few years ago.
We see vendors reducing memory in new smart phones in 2026 vs 2025 for example.
At least for the moment falling consumer tech hardware prices are over.
Despite the high price, the Bentley factory is running 24/7 and still behind schedule due to orders placed by the rental-car company, who has nearly-infinite money.
I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.
Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.
It’s also false that the technology has changed very little.
The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel and sometimes to stainless steel all result in vastly different products. Not to mention the advances in composite materials for handles.
Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what people actually used knives for.
A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but they’re not something every household has or needs.
This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at first glance, but doesn’t make sense once you dig in.
With that said, if it is a hallucination (and it sounds like it was), it's one of the more interesting ones I have encountered. It almost has the shape of a good idea.
Blade and handle material has certainly changed over the years, but I think good arguments about how relevant that is could be made both ways. They remain handled cutting tools, used in the same general way, for the same general purposes (though as you posted out, some use cases have gone away). Basically anyone from any of these periods would recognize a knife from any other, and be able to pick it up and make immediate use of it for all their normal knife related purposes.
To be clear though, I am now siding with the clankers and arguing for a hallucination. It's an interesting thing to think about, but it sounds like it's not an established concept in any way shape or form.
It was sticker price of $33,000 adjusted for inflation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Taurus_%28second_generati...
I don't think it would even feel safe to drive at all compared to what we have got use to with modern cars. It broke down 3 times while I had it and stranded me on the road. No cell phone of course to call anyone.
These were the mythic "good ol days".
I also think we're, as ICs, being given Bentleys meanwhile they're trying to invent Waymos to put us all out of work.
Humans are the cost center in their world model.