I bought my current phone for $94 brand new. It can communicate with other devices over the air through literal magic. It has 2.5 million tiny lights, each independently controlled to be any color I want. It knows where I am anywhere on the planet. Through it, I can access an essentially infinite pool of entertainment, hail life-saving emergency services, perform monetary transactions, acquire food, etc.
This piece of cloth is twice the price and it can't even make phone calls.
Literally not magic, but millions of patents and innovations that we understand down to the quantum level.
That's why the Romans could never make huge advances, they didn't understand the fundamentals. They knew using coal to make swords gave them better, harder edges, but they found it by raw accident, not knowing that the iron and carbon were combining atomically.
This piece of cloth is twice the price and it can't even make phone calls.