> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.

Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.

Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.

Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.