An iPhone 5s would cost $3.56 million back in 1991

Technology has definitely come a long way since two decades ago. Back in the 1990’s, laptops would be crazy expensive and people would pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for additional storage which can now be had for $10-$20. That being said, have you ever wondered how much an iPhone would have cost you back in 1991? Well according to Bret Swanson at Tech Policy Daily, he has estimated that an iPhone back in 1991 would have cost at least an eye-watering $3.56 million! 

The capabilities of today’s are so incredible, a few weeks ago we came across a 20-year old RadioShack ad and everything you could buy  has already been made obsolete by the iPhone. Still, the iPhone’s powers are so much greater than those products it doesn’t do justice to compare it to a $29.99 speed dial phone, so Bret Swanson at Tech Policy Daily decided to find out how much an iPhone would really cost in 1991. Swanson’s back-of-the-envelope math estimates it would have cost Apple over $3 million to make a machine with comparable powers to the iPhone back in 1991, and that’s only counting some of the hardware. In his breakdown, Swanson says a chip like the A7 with enough power to process 20,500 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) would have come with a $620,000 pricetag in ’91, but the most expensive technology would be the iPhone’s wicked fast LTE connection of 15Mbps.