SortStack #990 — 2029-02-23

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. A single supermarket tea bag $0.05

   Tea bags were popularized by accident: a New York merchant shipped samples in silk pouches, and customers dunked the whole pouch.

2. An average US movie theater ticket $11

   Theaters keep little of this — studios take most of the box office, which is why a bucket of popcorn can cost nearly as much as the seat.

3. A PlayStation 5 console $500

   The PS5 sold out so fast at launch during the pandemic that scalper bots became a news story — resale prices briefly doubled the sticker.

4. An iPhone Pro at launch $999

   The components inside an iPhone cost Apple roughly half the sticker price — the rest covers R&D, software, marketing, and famously healthy margins.

5. A new MacBook Pro, base model $1.6K

   Apple's first laptop ancestor, the 1989 Macintosh Portable, weighed over seven kilograms and cost the equivalent of more than $16,000 today.

6. The cheapest new car sold in America, a Nissan Versa $17K

   The sub-$20,000 new car is nearly extinct in the US — in 2019 there were over a dozen models under that line; now essentially one remains.

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