It is one thing to see the price of your state-of-the-art smartphone go up; it’s a whole different thing to see whole swaths of the population in low-income countries being priced out of the market completely. One of the more hopeful developments in tech over the last twenty years was the massive democratization of Internet access through the availability of cheap smartphones. Travel to any low-income country and you will see masses of people being able to access the Internet using sub-$100 smartphones. The AI boom led to a steep increase in the price for RAM chips, which in turn led to an equally steep increase in the price of (low-end) smartphones – leaving many people without the ability to purchase a smartphone and hence not being able to access the Internet.
So the trend of the last few decades, of consumer electronics getting better and cheaper every year, faces a sharp reversal: the poor world is now entering a smartphone crisis.
