These "price comparisons" really need to be divided into specific categories.
$1 from 1999 would be worth a lot more for buying a house, since house prices have gone up insane.
$1 from 1999 would be worth much less for technology: a modern-day phone would be essentially priceless, but if you only care about specs, it could be replicated in a supercomputer, albeit for >$100 million (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977330)
Even within a category it depends: certain food items (junk food) seem to have gone up in price considerably more than others.
I saw a YT vid that referenced a research paper that used a particular basket of goods to define the quality of life for a peasant in the Roman Empire.
I think the trick is to build your personal consumption basket for essential unchanging goods and use that for comparison. Certain things like the types of food I eat have been reasonably consistent over the past 20 years. So something like "how many calories & grams of protein could I buy in 2003 vs 2023", and then compare that my hypothetical wage growth over that timeframe. Or wow much is a quart of oil? I needed to do oil changes 20 years ago, and still do my own today, etc...
> $1 from 1999 would be worth much less for technology
This is expected given technology is advancing but pricing hasn't changed much if you factor in relative costs to relative performance / outcomes.
For example in 1999-2000 you could have gotten a really solid machine capable of playing Quake 3 (the latest and greatest FPS game of that time) getting a rock solid 125 fps on a CRT monitor capable of doing 120hz for around $650-700.
Realistically a solid machine nowadays with a mid-grade GPU is likely going to run you $1,000 to $1,200 and that could easily be more if you wanted a higher end GPU.
All in all you're talking about a little under double the price which is roughly what an inflation calculator says (1.85x) for the same relative outcome.
> For example in 1999-2000 you could have gotten a really solid machine capable of playing Quake 3 (the latest and greatest FPS game of that time) getting a rock solid 125 fps on a CRT monitor capable of doing 120hz for around $650-700.
In 1999, a CRT with a 20" viewable area cost $999 [1] with reviewers saying "The price point on this monitor is fantastic"
> In 1999, a CRT with a 20" viewable area cost $999 [1] with reviewers saying "The price point on this monitor is fantastic"
Not all monitors were that expensive back then.
I got a 21" 1600x1200 NEC for $150 around that time (1999-2001) that could do 120hz at the resolution I played Quake 3 at. That was shipped too even though it weighed almost more than me.
The funny thing is that $70 22" monitor you linked is 1080p which has been around for almost 20 years. I hope it's dirt cheap by now. A 1080p LCD used to be really expensive when they came out too, and most LCDs were bad back then where "good" could be categorized as having a high refresh rate, good color range and fast response times / low input latency.
$1 from 1999 would be worth a lot more for buying a house, since house prices have gone up insane.
$1 from 1999 would be worth much less for technology: a modern-day phone would be essentially priceless, but if you only care about specs, it could be replicated in a supercomputer, albeit for >$100 million (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977330)
Even within a category it depends: certain food items (junk food) seem to have gone up in price considerably more than others.