I’d never thought of this; I just wanted to make sure there was some adjustment when comparing prices. S.M. Oliva of Computer Chronicles Revisited wrote me that “one of my pet peeves is people who discuss historic computer prices ‘adjusted for inflation’ without accounting for differences in capacity.
For example, I’ll hear a retro computing channel on YouTube say something like, “The original Macintosh cost $2,500 at launch, which adjusted for inflation would be $8,000 today!” Sure, except that today nobody would actually buy a computer with 128K of memory and a 5-inch monochrome screen to use in productive work.”
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