A cellphone in 1983 cost $3,500

[Alan C.]

Happy birthday! The cellphone is 40 years old today

Forty years ago, on April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper made the first ever cellphone call. At the time, he was working for Motorola and the call he made was to a rival colleague at another telecoms company.

Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, told his rival that he was speaking from "a 'real' cellular telephone." There are now across the world more than 6 billion cellphones, or mobile phones, as they call them outside of the US.

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Mike Short CBE, Vice President of Telefonica Europe said: "In 40 years we've moved rapidly from the mobile phone as a businessman's tool, through consumerization and Internet access to everything being connected. In the future we will see a much wider range of devices—many of which will be wearable."

Short went on to talk about how cellphone technology will become more integrated with the human body, including the ability to be able to be controlled by the senses:

"We will work more fully with all the senses. The move to glasses has begun—how can we use eye control to change and look at pages? Wearables, in terms of smartphone watches, are coming. We'll also see health measurement body vests that can communicate with your phone and then your doctor."

Cooper is now 85 years old and is called the "father" of the cellphone. The first cellphones to hit the market, in 1983, were priced at a colossal $3,500. Cooper believed that the cost and the huge size of the phones would stop the them being further developed for the mass market. How wrong he was.

Cooper says: "We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin."

Martin Cooper had a vision that would see the phone begin to represent an individual, that the phone number would not be assigned to a place but to a person. That vision has become a reality with almost everyone in the West now identifiable as a number.

Adjusted for inflation, $3,500 in 1983 is roughly $7,950 in 2013.

Now it's possible to buy a vastly superior mobile phone for under $30.

This was made possible by the marvel of the capitalistic order of production. The greedy capitalists, who are out to make a profit, have brought this labor-saving (and in some cases, life-saving) innovation to the masses.

Meanwhile, the central planners have driven up the cost of medical care, caused shortages, and spread misery.

[Metric]

Oh the horrors of deflation.

Aren't we concered about all the money that was invested into these expensive cellphones that are now worthless?

Aren't we worried that consumers will postpone buying indefinitely, due to an expectation of lower prices in the future?

If only we could escape the ravages of these "unsteered" markets and animal spirits, somehow -- make it more like the health care industry or something...

[st434u]

It's important to point out that one of the main reasons why cellphone quality has gone up so much, and it's cost has gone down so much, is that, being a new industry, the (mostly worldwide) relative lack of regulation in cellphone production; when compared to some of the other industries like the ones you named.

Another reason would be that, being a new industry, there was a lot of room for improvements to be developed. When you put both things together, you get this amazing increase in quality and lowering of cost.