Tl;dr that iPhone would have had to sell for $86k to be 100x the price of what it was in 2007.

$10 today isn’t 10x $1 from 2007. Money is worth less now due to inflation. A $600 iPhone in 2007 corrected for inflation today is $865.

Another way to look at it is if you put $100 in a safe in 2007 and you pull it out now, it’s still $100 but worth a lot less than it was back then, only $69 in today’s money when buying an item that also corrected for inflation. So if a widget costs you $100 today, if it followed the same inflation, it would have cost $69 in 2007, but you still had $100 bill back then. Today that money has lost value so it takes the whole $100 to buy that widget.

Edit: well since I’m on the downvote train, I don’t guess there’s much I can do at this point but I did want to clarify that i meant this in the context of reselling an item for a profit. People will read this and say “they made 100x!” and I was showing why that’s not the case. All the time people get mad at the price of something in the past compared to now and that’s because they aren’t correcting for inflation. Sure, as the other guy pointed out price vs value, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m actually talking about price, that price was in a different currency, it was in 2007USD which is not the same as today. I know we are talking about a headline and yes it’s fun to see “100x”, I just wanted to add some economics in there as well.

Edit2: removed the superfluous first line and fixed the 10x that should have been 100x