Blog

WOW FACTOR

Your iPhone vs. 1965 Supercomputing

If you wanted in 1965 the computing power you now hold in your iPhone, you would have needed to spend the equivalent of:

$20 trillion (in today’s dollars)

That is the actual calculation of the cost of materials and development in 1965.

What It Would Have Taken in 1965

To match the computing power of a single modern iPhone:

• Cost (1965):
  ~$2.0 trillion
  (≈ $20 trillion today)

• Computers required:
  ~666,000 CDC 6600 supercomputers
  (the fastest machines in the world at the time)

• Electric power:
  ~20 gigawatts, continuously
  (roughly 20 large power plants)

• Land and buildings:
  ~820 acres of raised-floor, air-conditioned facilities
  (larger than Central Park)

• Electricity cost alone:
  ~$4 billion per year (1965 dollars)

One iPhone

• 1965:
  • 80 Apollo Moon Programs
  • 30 Interstate Highway Systems
    
  • billions per year just to keep the lights on
  •  hundreds of football fields
• Now: 
  • Cents to recharge
  • Fits in your pocket
  • Affordable version every year

Why This Matters

In 1965, this level of computing power was not just expensive —
it was national-scale, military-grade, and economically prohibitive.

Today, it is ordinary. Teenagers carry it. Children play with it. We use it to scroll.

More than “progress” this is a civilizational phase transition

• Like water freezing or boiling, the rules change.
• Before: compute is scarce, centralized, strategic.
• After: compute is abundant, personal, ambient.

The Ordinary Miracle

What once required more money than the entire U.S. economy produced in a year is now something we casually upgrade every few years.

For the compute in an iPhone:

• The cost dropped by a factor of 10 billion
• The size dropped by a factor of 300 billion
• The power dropped by a factor of 4 billion

Civilization rewritten in silicon.

This comparison illustrates the compounding effects of decades of advances in semiconductor density, energy efficiency, manufacturing scale, and global competition.

If this feels advanced, remember: it was built before AI automated intelligence itself.
So hat’s off to the carnival barker: “We ain’t seen nothing yet!”