Do you remember the NeXT computer, the one Steve Jobs began building in 1985 after he was booted from Apple by then-Chief Executive John Sculley and the board?
It was supposed to be a machine built for academia, the ultimate learning tool priced so that universities could buy them in bulk. But, Jobs being Jobs, he had particular ideas about what it should look like and how it should be made.
It had to be a perfect cube, which created manufacturing complications. The screws inside the computer required expensive plating. His engineers designed custom chips instead of using off-the-shelf semiconductors. He built a futuristic factory to manufacture the computer, which included, as Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, "$20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase, just as in the corporate headquarters."
The result was exactly what you'd expect: a beautiful machine that colleges couldn't possibly afford. Jobs's higher education advisers had told him the cost needed to be $2,000 to $3,000. When it was launched in October 1988, all the bells and whistles brought the price to $6,500. I thought of the NeXT computer when I read in the New York Times recently that Apple's new headquarters building in Cupertino, California - its official name is Apple Park; unofficially it's "the spaceship" - cost an astonishing $5 billion. That makes it the world's third most expensive modern building at the time of completion (after the Abraj Al Bait, a skyscraper hotel complex in Mecca, and the Marina Bay Sands, a casino and entertainment center in Singapore).
A Google search unearthed the news that when the complex was originally designed in 2011, it was supposed to cost a little under $3 billion. That would have made it more expensive than the headquarters...