1y ago

What are some things that used to be expensive, but which no longer are?

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?

70 comments

International phone calls. Actually long distance domestic phone calls too.
- Don’t call me before 9pm my friend!
  
  Ugh, or how about the friends you couldn't text because they had to pay to read incoming SMS.
- long distance domestic phone call
  What's that?
  
  In the pre- cellphone era, you would pay for telephone calls by the minute, and you would be charged a different rate if you called someone who lived out of your area. Like, a different rate per minute to talk to them? (I'm an Elder Millenial, so I grew up hearing about this stuff but didn't live with it in my adult life, I just vaguely remember the adult freak-outs about unsanctioned long distance calls...always due to the impending huge telephone bill you'd get for it.) My point being, companies like AT&T (Ma Bell) had an utter stranglehold on telecommunications and would make you pay out the nose to call someone out of your area in the same country, and international calls were even steeper.
  This was an age where the telephone company monopoly was so bad that they were forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government to force competition and a better market for consumers. (Imagine if, say, Amazon, was forcibly broken up into smaller companies by the government.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
  In the digital age, I can basically call someone in the next room as cheaply as I can call someone in Australia. (Speaking from a USA pov.) One of the few things that's better in the 2020s is how easy/cheap it is to call people now. (And text, and email, etc.)
If it's okay to go waaaaay back: salt. It's always mind-blowing to me that people all over europe during the medieval age or even before that couldn't season anything with salt cause it often was as expensive as gold itself. If I imagine those huge amounts of salt if you wanna pickle some meat or fish. Today salt costs nearly nothing, nearly everybody can afford it and it's so basic that some even don't consider it "seasoning" at all.
- Aluminium once was way more expensive than gold. That's why the top of the obelisk in Washington is made from aluminum.
- I imagine those beside the ocean must have figured out what happens when boiling sea water. But I guess it was scaling it that was an issue?
  Tons of English phrases and words have salty origins, like salary.
  
  Yeah, the scaling and transportation. If you wanted salt near the alps it was expensive as hell and mostly the salt came from mines, but that was a very difficult task.
  Salary comes from salty? Like in a good way? I know an old "word" for salt in German is "weißes Gold" (white gold).
I always used to figure a decent desktop computer would cost me between $2k and $3k. That's going back to the early 90s. But even though the value of a dollar has plummeted since then, you can get a decent desktop for significantly less, maybe half.
- I was able to build a desktop capable of 4k60 for around $1500, and I overbuilt in places. You can definitely do okay at $1000 or less if you’re aiming for lower resolutions these days.
  
  Yep, for sure. And you can get a serviceable system for closer to $500, though you aren't going to pay high end games.
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.
- TVs are cheap now because viewers are the product. From what I've heard, "dumb" TVs and other high end displays (PC monitors, TVs designed for business and education use, medical imaging displays, etc.) are still rather expensive
- 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.
- I've noticed how cheap TVs are. I was thinking of getting one for like the first time in decades and I got sort of reverse sticker shock at how much screen you can get for so cheap a price.
  Hand in hand with that, there's a lot more marketing gobbledy-gook out there trying to upsell schmucks on features that are only marginally better, probably because basic large TVs are so cheap now. So they try hard to get people to upgrade more frequently than needed, or to get features that probably won't make one iota of a difference in the viewing experience, just to sell more units/pricier units.
  
  Yep, our newest TV is about 8 years old and the only thing we would get from this years model is slightly better picture quality.
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.
- now they're free on Anna's archive, what a world
Wikipedia functionally ended the market for encyclopedias. When I was a kid I would go to the library and read an encyclopedia just to see what random knowledge was in there. Traveling salesman would sell encyclopedias door to door and they were hugely expensive. Then Encarta came along and it was mind blowing you could have all that information on some CDs. Then Wikipedia killed all of them and did it for free.
When computers began to take hold in middle class homes, one of the biggest gold rushes was to be the encyclopedia of choice on the computer, since consumers saw encyclopedia software as an obvious (and maybe best!) use case for a computer.
UNIX
AT&T, IBM, and a few others used to charge tens of thousands of dollars for it but Berkeley and Linus Torvalds both created kernels that didn’t use any of their code and pushed UNIX into a very niche market while open source UNIX derivatives took over the market. This is vastly over simplified but UNIX now has open source derivatives that anyone can use, modify, or distribute.
FYI the cheaper LEDs and usb power outlets are all disposable quality. Prices on the high quality stuff are coming down because of the downward force of cheap shit, but the really cheap shit is cheap because it's shit.
- Any brand suggestions?
  
  Phillips bulbs are like 10x an LED bulb from Walmart but I've gone through 10x the bulbs and my Phillips are still trucking.
- That not really true, it's cheap because manufacturing is a solved problem and incredibly easy to exceed the requirements.
  
  It's cheaper for those reasons.
  Cheap shit on Temu, Amazon, and AliExpress is cheap because it's shit.
Along those same lines, I would say LCD monitors and TVs. Obviously they are not "cheap" as in pocket change, but they are an order of magnitude less than when the tech was introduced.
Also computer storage, e.g. SSD drives and SD cards. (Although maybe it's cheating to cite anything related to Moore's Law.)
- Storage is cheaper than it was before, but it's still quite expensive. 4TB SSDs are simply out of my budget, and even the higher tier of mechanical drives are really expensive
  
  This is a proportional interpretation. The cost of data storage has absolutely plumetted since, say, 1990.
  
  The significantly increased in price this year as SSD companies are reducing production due to lower demands.
  
  4TB SSDs are simply out of my budget
  They're $200-$300 on Amazon atm.
  You can get 512gb for $30 though, which boggles me.
  When SSDs were new, I paid about $350 for a mere 250gb SSD.
Embedded computers.
It used to be that everything got a custom or at least customized circuit board, and fancy wifi or Bluetooth functionality, or smarter programmable features would make that really expensive.
Recently, the cost of embeddable system on a chip setups has dropped low enough that it's typically cheaper to put more computer power then you need in a device than to make something custom.
It's why everything has wi-fi and Bluetooth now. It's cheaper to use the prefab piece, and those all come with that build in, so you may as well advertise it.
Digital calipers. I have a pair of high quality Mitutoyo calipers from a long time ago that cost $250 and some from eBay more recently that cost $15. Honestly the $15 ones are nowhere near as good, but definitely usable. I'm assuming some in say the $50 range could be just as good as my expensive ones.
Not too terribly long ago, clothing was super expensive. Like, make a dress from burlap or old feed sacks instead of buying something expensive. Some companies that sold feed and seed would print floral patterns on the sacks because they knew customers would turn the old sacks into clothing for their children.
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.
Lots of old cars. You can get 80s and 90s Rolls Royce for very cheap from private sellers. Some late 70s / early 80s Ferraris (like the 308) can be had for under $10k.
Mind you, they're still incredibly expensive to maintain and thus not terribly practical, but the cost to entry can be far lower than most would think.
- Where do you look for stuff like that?
  
  Tbh I see quite a few on the regular using local Craigslist.
Typically things they can they can tack subscription fees onto
- Every god damn fitness app for VR... Why the hell do I need to pay a subscription fee just to keep better track of how much I swung my controllers or head around or set higher goals than the built-in system?
  
  I've never thought about VR for fitness. I have a VR that I never use. Any suggestions on an app that isn't expensive? I'm fat and trying to be not fat. Lol
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!
  
  I skirted the ZX81. I had a self-built computer and a TI99A before and a C64 after that.
I mean sure if you are talking leds but if your talking light bulbs in general then they are way more expensive than back in the day. Anything before mass production is more expensive than after but if you mean something that was basically mass produced but got cheaper then I think that has happended sometimes when a better process comes along. Gas is pretty cheap now relative to inflation.
- An individual bulb is somewhat more expensive, yes, but I've noticed I no longer half-expect the typical popping sound of an incandescent bulb going dead randomly when I turn on a light because it's been so long since I've had a bulb truly burn out on me. Used to be a few-times-a-year thing, now it's more like once every 5+ years.
  
  Ive been a bit disappointed. They said ten years but I have had them die in a few. Still longer than the incandescent but they seem to have so much more components it makes me wonder if they are truly better given the materials.
TVs. I once paid ~$300 for a 32" CRTV. Now I can get a 55" flat screen for under $100. It's weird.
- Where can you get a 55" TV for under3r $100? The cheapest I see on Amazon is about $250

70 comments