I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?

Of course, consumers don't intrinsically care about the bits. It would be more interesting to look at "price per website viewed/movie watched/game stored on your disk". Just like "time to open program" has worsened despite objective HW improvements, I'm not sure those metrics got any better.

I'm almost cynically happy about Moore's law ending and hardware getting expensive if this is what it takes to improve software in the long term.

Because on necessities (repeated expenditures that cannot be budgeted away, like food and housing), inflation is higher now than at almost any other point in the history of the US. Who cares if I can get a large TV for $100 now, if my grocery bill has quadrupled?

Both of those examples come mostly from innovative technology, not economics of sscale. 10TB drives today are literally completely different things than 10TB drives from 20 years ago.

How important is that HD to you compared to housing, education, transportation, healthcare?

The prices of all those things continue to skyrocket.

I think we should look at the percentage margins they maintain on their products. Since the emergence of scaling laws, the benefits have largely been passed on to end consumers. However, scaling laws now seem to be approaching their limits.

Oh, good, that saves me $300/year.

How much can you buy memory for?

> But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300

Can you? I assume you mean spinning platter, but even then.

10TB HDDs were like $200 just 5 years ago dude.

Computer parts are unaffordable this year.

iPad price remark gets Fed's Dudley an earful - https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge... - March 11th, 2011

“I can't eat an iPad.”

> Best not to cite the price of the new iPad as an example of why inflation isn't a problem when you head into a working-class neighborhood. In Queens, New York, on Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley did just that. He got an earful. After being bombarded with questions about food inflation, Dudley attempted to reassure his audience by putting rising commodity prices into a broader economic context -- but that only made matters worse. "When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" one audience member asked. Dudley tried to explain how the Fed sees things: Yes, food and energy prices may be rising, but at the same time, other prices are declining. He then stretched for a real world example. The only problem was he chose the Apple's latest tablet computer that hit stores on Friday, which may be more popular at the New York Fed's headquarters near Wall Street than it is on the gritty streets of Queens. "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful," he said."You have to look at the prices of all things." This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience, with one audience member calling the comment "tone deaf." "I can't eat an iPad," another said.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

Capitalism is good at driving down prices for consumer goods, also great at extracting rents from essentials (housing, medicine, education, etc). You gain on trinkets and lose on the things that make life worth living.

Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.

The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.

Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).