This is an interview with Steve Jobs from 40 years ago (1981). Yes, fourty years ago ... If watch from 05:00 to 05:20 he says: "There's not enough specific applications to cost-justify spending $1000 to $3000 for a personal computer to be used in the home, yet..."
That tells quite a lot ...
- The price of personal computers remained in a similar nominal range for 40 years- while you can now buy a computer for $200 or less, there are also $5000+ personal computers and the median price is probably somewhere between $1000 and $3000. But the computer industry went through a major upscaling and its efficiency increased manifold in the last four decades ... yet the value of the dollar depreciated almost as quickly as the efficiency of computer manufacturing increased. And I'm not talking here about the Moore's law and the increased performance of today's computers compared with 1981, but purely about industrial processes.
- As the role of the personal computer in our lives is gradually being taken over by the smartphone, it is perhaps not incidental that their price tends to grow higher, toward the same $1000 - $3000 range, despite the natural increase in the efficiency of manufacturing processes
Food for thought