Meanwhile, government will tell you inflation is some number like ~5%

Inflation is an average of many things. Computer components have a huge spike in demand with insufficient increase in supply, which is going to lag for years, so we might as well be buying at auction. It's not a price that flows through the entire economy, like the price of oil.

So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.

Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.

Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.

Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.

Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]

[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...

Politicians pretend it’s much lower. Or claim that deflation is occurring through statements like “we are bringing prices down”.

The base model 13" MacBook Air released in 2020 was $1,299. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to... $1,299.

The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.

And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.

Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...

That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.

[dead]