One would hope so! I remember very well the price of my wife's original PC, and my A3000. I think I paid close to four figures for an expansion box with 2MB of RAM in it. Actually, you have a point about the step-wise nature of perf/price advances, but agreeing is no fun, and I've been dragged into this, so in the finest tradition of sunk-cost fallacy....
https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/ would have you believe that gflops/$ is supposed to be increasing 10x over five years. This is likely driven by GPU advances over the timespan measured, because anyone in their right mind ... but, what the heck, running the numbers:
x^60 = 10; x^15 = 1.8. If I was expecting an 80% improvement over 15 months, I think you'd rightly call it whining :>
Personally I'm more hoping for ~2x over 5 years. This past decade has been a disaster, and no one needs to take me to task over Intel -- I've been all over other forums kvetching about it. I'm personally in a bad spot because I'd like to see them take a long walk off a short cliff, but competition would actually be better.... At any rate (and I *swear* I did not do the math beforehand):
x^60 = 2; x^15 = 1.196. So, yeah, I'm hoping for about 19% (?!) performance improvement per year with inflation-adjusted pricing. For anyone looking at the low-end price adjustments, you're getting just a bit more than inflation-adjusting increases
So, now I'm in the unenviable position of relying on Intel to create competitive products.