That has become no longer true since last year.

20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.

But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.

Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.

For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)

We had a good run where PCs were not very popular (all the "PC is dying" headlines we got, huh) and the parts were improving so fast that there was a healthy second hand market with aggressive prices.

Nowadays you get a cpu that's 10% every 2 years (or every 4 if you don't take into account amd 3d cache parts) and a gpu that is basically the same with better RT performance (unless you pay an obscene amount of cash for the nvidia top of the line).

Second hand market is way worse as parts last longer being relevant and prices in retail and second hand markets go up as result. Put on top of that a crypto frenzy followed by an AI frenzy and the DIY market has been in a dark age for a decade.

I'd say a pc you buy today is more performant for the price than one bought 10 years earlier. But 10 years earlier you could get yourself something very nice for 500 bucks and today you just can't do that as entry level everything starts at like 700 bucks or more.

If you measure ‘bang’ by hardware metrics, they’re clearly orders of magnitude better value today. But if ‘bang’ means usefulness at solving life’s problems, it’s harder to compare, because the problems have changed so much, and so many of them now come from computers.

20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)

yeah but now you need 1GB of ram to run the weather apps so..

Flights are cheaper than ever.

But what about 1 year ago?

yes, they have more hardware power, but the bloated software requires more hardware power, so in most cases it doesn't really translate into gains for the user

The exception that proves the rule.