"People vastly underestimate the importance of general-purpose computing, and can’t fathom how much worse things can get when it’s gone. Imagine all the (real) economic benefits since the invention of the transistor being directed by a command economy. Liberties we take for granted on already flawed and compromised systems could be diminished entirely. A non-trivial part of this is that one could argue that personal computing has always been artificially cheap. It’s possible that these price hikes better represent a ‘fair’ value of these machines."
from longer post by @Libre Solutions Network