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Comment by boyaka | Hacker News Reader

My point is simply that the USD is now worth less and the raw materials are now more scarce and expensive than in 1991. You are right in calling me out about the scale though, as I guess that even if you had all the knowledge to create all the components necessary, you still would have a much smaller market and therefore less offsetting of the initial cost. However, if say, you made 2 phones for everybody, maybe that would bring the market up enough to reach the same scale as today's market?

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If you had all the knowledge to create the components, you would still need a decade or more of industrial advancement to reach the point where you could actually build the necessary components. Knowing how to build every piece of an iPhone wouldn't get you an iPhone in 1991, even if you had all the money in the world. You couldn't build the fundamental technologies fast enough.

Industrial advancement IS the knowledge of creating components. Hordes of people at giant companies are improving every minor aspect of the tools that create these components. If we had all of the knowledge these companies have built up at any point in history, it could be implemented. The tools are the HIGHEST cost in creating components because they cannot be changed dramatically, and it's difficult to put them through iterations of improvement because you need to keep using the expensive tool you made to make up the cost of what you paid for it.

Industrial advancement isn't just building on knowledge. It's building on infrastructure. You couldn't go back to the stone age and produce steel, because the infrastructure for creating steel simply didn't exist. There were no iron mines, no foundries, no skilled blacksmiths. You could speed up the process, but you'd still be dead before the first steel sword was forged.

Likewise, the infrastructure for building iPhone components didn't exist in 1991. The A7 is built on a 28nm process. The 486 in 1991 was shipping with (I believe) a 0.8 micrometer process. So the infrastructure of the time was three orders of magnitude away from being able to build this chip. And this says nothing of the other components which faced similar technological hurdles. You couldn't make all these hurdles go away. Building up major infrastructure takes time, and no amount of knowledge can reduce that time to zero.

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/i-pencil#axzz2sg52yand

As shown in this story by the simple example of a pencil, the ability to produce products of the type we have now at the expense we have now might as well require it to be 2014, not 1991.

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