If you want a fair comparison you should look at the price of storage at the capacity required for typical contemporaneous workloads. Don't quote numbers in the billions when that amount of storage didn't exist on the entire planet at the time.
A Macintosh 128K with a FLOPPY DRIVE cost $7,500 in inflation adjusted dollars.
Can we please take a view of today that’s in a context of more than a few years? It would really help perspective sometimes.
> It would really help perspective sometimes
It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.
As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then then a high end personal workstation (not big iron or server rack gear).
The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM.
The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800, including an upgrade to max RAM of $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM on this frontier workstation is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM, and more than a thousand times larger.
It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive.
We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things.
RAM is ~10,000 times cheaper for today’s workstation purchasers per byte, or ~ten times cheaper for max-out-that-bastard, which normalizes for technical progress.