Comment by jnwatson

1 day ago

Suggested retail price for Filemaker when it was originally released in 1985 for Macintosh was $195. That's about $600 these days.

It is about as expensive as it ever was.

6 comments

jnwatson

simondotau 1 day ago

Which is fair, if FileMaker existed in a vacuum. The inflation-adjusted cost of software and hardware has consistently trended downwards over the past 40 years.

pjmlp 1 day ago

As someone that pays for commercial software, only if you are talking about race to the bottom on mobile stores.

A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.

simondotau 19 hours ago

In terms of software, commercial quality software is now often free and/or open source. Maybe the best application software is still expensive, but free software is better than anything that existed a two decades ago let alone four decades. The only people deploying Windows Server these days are doing so for legacy reasons, not by choice.

In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Compaq Portable II (286)  $3,500   $10,700
  1996 Dell/Gateway Pentium 166  $2,500    $5,300
  2006 Dell XPS (Core 2 Duo)     $2,200    $3,650
  2016 Dell XPS 15               $1,500    $2,100
  2026 Dell XPS 14/16            $2,000    $2,000

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Macintosh Plus            $2,599    $7,900
  1996 Power Macintosh 7200      $2,000    $4,300
  2006 20" iMac                  $1,699    $2,800
  2016 13" MacBook Pro           $1,699    $2,360
  2026 14" MacBook Pro (M5)      $1,999    $2,000

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Novell NetWare            $3,000    $9,100
  1996 Windows NT Server 4.0     $1,100    $2,400
  2006 Windows Server 2003       $1,000    $1,660
  2016 Windows Server 2016         $900    $1,250
  2026 Linux                         $0        $0

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Early pro NLE systems    $50,000  $152,000
  1996 Adobe Premiere 4.2          $800    $1,700
  2006 Final Cut Pro             $1,000    $1,660
  2016 Final Cut Pro X             $300      $420
  2026 Da Vinci Resolve              $0        $0

And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.

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