I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete.

I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything.

Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run.

Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount of work I would’ve had to pay $10,000/mo for. Of course I’m expecting those numbers to get closer to each other.

No VC-funded gravy train lasts forever.

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orthogonal_cube 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.

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skybrian 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.)

My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.

	▲	orthogonal_cube 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that consumer goods normally get cheaper over time. Software that becomes commercialized, or sees a surge in enterprise demand, tends to go the other way. Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Slack for example.

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whynotmaybe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why do you expect the price to get closer?

You can get a table from Ikea that costs a fraction of what an artisan makes. They're not the same final product but their functions is the same.

	▲	hahn-kev 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Either AI gets more expensive, or the 10k outsourcing gets cheaper.