NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 04: Apple iPhone 16 are seen on display at an Apple store on April 04, 2025 in New York, New York. U.S. President Donald Trump declared a U.S. economic emergency and announced sweeping tariffs of at least 10% and with rates even higher for 60 countries or that have a high trade deficit with the U.S. The tariffs will affect electronics, automobiles, clothing and shoes, wines and spirits, and swiss watches. In retaliation, China announced that they will impose 34% tariffs on the U.S. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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So much that we see as expensive in the present will be incredibly cheap in the future. There are so many examples of this, so many past examples that so many readers know well (remember “long-distance” calling?), but since so many readers have an Apple iPhone, it’s best to pinpoint one of certainly countless examples emanating from the supercomputer that fits in our pockets. Think iMovie.
And in thinking about it, contemplate how when Toy Story (produced by Pixar – one of Steve Jobs’s achievements while away from Apple) was created a little over thirty years ago, the 81-minute film required enormous amounts of time and money to make. Maya Phillips at the New York Times reports that “an individual frame” of the movie “could take anywhere from the better part of an hour to a full 30 hours to render, and there were over 100,000 frames to work in the film.” Lucky for Pixar and Jobs that Toy Story did $400 million at the box office.
Fast forward to the present, and iMovie makes it possible for anyone with imaginatio to make a real movie. On the high end we’ve seen this through auteur Steven Soderbergh and his use of three now primitive iPhone 7 phones to shoot Unsane in 2018. Soderbergh did it again with High Flying Bird in 2019.
With Soderbergh, stop and think about what his utilization of technology available to us all for so little money means to past entry barriers in the filmmaking industry. Prohibitive costs meant that very few very rarely got to make films.
Consider Brian Grazer, producer of financially successful films including Splash, Parenthood, A Beautiful Mind, and Apollo 13. Despite his impressive track record, Grazer observed in his 2015 book A Curious Mind that he was turned down for film projects 90 percent of the time. Later on he quipped that “Instead of spelling out the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills, they could have spelled out: N-O-N-O-NO-N-O!” Which requires a pivot.
Phillips Curve is in the title of this opinion piece. The Curve is broadly accepted wisdom among economists, Federal Reserve economists in particular. It’s informed by the theory that economic growth has an inflationary downside as soaring demand outpaces supply.
On its face the theory is absurd. That’s because all demand is an effect of production. If individuals are demanding more market goods, it’s because they’ve produced market goods in commensurate amounts. Supply and demand mirror one another.
From there, let’s never forget what economic growth is. It’s increased productivity, and the latter is an effect of producers matched with capital divining all new ways to produce a great deal more for a great deal less. The iPhone itself looms powerfully large here: the combined technology found in them (from the very first one in 2007) would have literally cost millions of dollars not terribly long before the supercomputer was brought to market.
What the iPhone tells us on its own is that far from a driver of higher prices, economic growth (meaning productivity) is the surest signal of falling prices for everything. The Phillips Curve is backwards.
Bringing it back to films, it used to be incredibly expensive for would-be filmmakers to merely uncap a wildly expensive camera to start the filming process, hence Grazer’s lament about what the Hollywood sign should say. No longer.
Owners of iPhones can not only make movies on them, they can craft brilliant trailers in costless fashion, and that have hints of Soderbergh in them. Even though the Phillips Curve was always bogus, it’s beautiful to watch the iPhone eviscerate it in so many ways.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2025/11/30/apples-iphone-eviscerates-the-federal-reserves-phillips-curve/
