Inflation rates look at a basket of commodity items. Pretending it has any relevance at all to tech is beyond foolish. Tech drops in price over time.
In 1954, a black and white 19 inch TV was $1000. Using your inflation calculator that works out to $9400 in 2018 dollars. So, by your logic today a black and white 19" CRT TV with vacuum tubes should cost nearly $10,000 and a 75" flat panel 4k color display should be astronomically more expensive. Yet that 75" flat panel is well below $2000.
The point is pretending that inflation works flat across the board is just foolish, it gives you a general idea of what your money is worth overall, and in the case of tech, it emphasized that prices are falling far faster than it even appears. In fact that $2000 TV today is under $250 in 1954 dollars, less than a quarter the price of the 19" back in the day.
And before you pretend this is too esoteric. Computer prices have been plummeting since 2011 outside the Apple ecosystem. One TB of very fast SSD (Evo 960) is currently below $300 for black Friday, it was about $500 this time last year. Look at the Apple price for a TB of storage. It's sickening. If you look at a midrange or high end laptop today outside of Apple, it's cheaper than a similarly ranked machine cost in 2011. Intel NUC boxes blow the 2018 mac mini out of the water so badly it's not even funny anymore. And fully loaded, the NUC is about 1/3rd the price of the vastly inferior mac mini. In 2012, the mac mini was better value than any other SFF computer on the market. And don't even get started on the iMac Pro. Non-Apple tablets are insanely cheaper than they were in 2011, yet the iPad is beyond $2000 (with pencil and keyboard). This has nothing to do with inflation, tech prices are dropping as Apple prices are skyrocketing.
