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?
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!
International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.
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.
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.
Our first colour tv cost about 3 months of my dad’s salary in the early 1970s. And the Siemens mainframe computer in the company he worked for was tens of thousands (which was more than a year’s worth of the average salary). Rent. Every month. It had less computing power than my smartphone.
