TIL
CPI didn’t incorporate a smartphone specific cost-deflator until a decade after the iPhone’s launch (in ’18, when they also began imputing prices on a matched model basis)
The combined deflator suggests that per dollar today’s iPhone is only ~3x better than the original

Today’s iPhone has 3x the battery, ~200x the CPU, ~3,000x the GPU, and a camera that takes better shots than most $1,000 SLRs (vs the original which sported 2 megapixels)

But leave aside the spec improvements (which CPI should have been able to capture but didn’t).
Today’s iPhone also has the entire app ecosystem, provides massively faster connectivity (including satellite), and supports a whole constellation of other devices (watch, AirPods, etc)

When a hardware device category suddenly submits to software improvements—when a disruptive technology cuts into a sector—macro statistics have trouble keeping up and may take a decade to figure out how to accommodate the change (and then will have trouble effectively doing so.)