Tech salaries were lower then relative to other salaries, so if you look at it in terms of how much money it would have meant to people, it would probably be more than that. I believe people were also much stingier about equity then, so I expect they saw it as a kingly bonus.
Another way to compare it would be to look at what would have happened if they had, as many did, bought houses in Silicon Valley. That's a much higher inflation rate.
But the most fun way to think about it (and in some ways least accurate as well) is asking, "What if they kept the stock?" Google shows shares of Apple trading then for three bucks and change, so call it 3 million shares of today's stock. So that's $1.6 billion of Apple stock in today's market.
No, it doesn't. What would make more sense is showing the calculation. Also it's nitpicky.
If you wanted to use significant figures, it would make more sense to say $28 million or $28.4 million. Going to one significant figure is overkill. Whether you trust the CPI or not, those that made it chose more than one digit for it. Also I feel it's just a coincidence that Woz chose a round 10. I think he chose to make it a round million, but it could easily have been 5 million or 15 million or even something that isn't a multiple of 5 million instead of 10 million, were the circumstances different.
I actually think it's borderline impossible to inflation adjust $10M 197x (for any value of x) dollars to today's money in any reasonable way, given the dramatic changes in lifestyle and how they affect any plausible representative basket of goods. So I profoundly disagree with you. If anything, there should be much more uncertainty than my $30M, that sort of implies between $25 and $35M (approx), still too precise for me. Your suggestions of $28M or $28.4M I feel are absurd. Although not nearly as absurd as using 10 full figures of significance. Finance is the only field where that occurs routinely, and I can never understand why nobody gets called on it (hence my original comment). I agree with you on the number Woz chose. Basically he was choosing a round number that was a "whole lot of money", and no doubt today he would choose an even bigger round number that's still "a whole lot of money".
I think people who care just get used to reading notes on the numbers instead of having the numbers sanitized before they get to them. I agree it's a problem but I think the best solution is to get more people to read the notes than to sanitize the numbers. I think the numbers should have most of their figures dropped, though.
