Absolutely the computer has been a big boon, except to the recording
and music businesses...

But even here we see the principle at work. The early (micro)computers
were repairable to the component level. You could align and clean
floppy drives, replace ICs, et al. There were scheatics. Building a
peripheral was a doable project for the electronic hobbyist. It's 100%
pluck-and-chuck today and if we got into an Asian trade war business
would be heavily impacted waiting for an American source for hard
drives, RAM, and other products.

And cheapening is rampant and always has been. SCSI was unquestionably
better than IDE, and today it's almost nonexistent, because IDE is
cheaper. Unix workstations killed the really elegant environnments,
Windows killed commercial Unix, and now Linux is beginning to make
serious inroads on Windows-although Linux is more reliable, will it
make progress without commercial pressure?

Monitors, keyboards, power supplies, and many other components of
popular PC hardware are far less well built than in the early days of
microcomputers-to say nothing of the beautifully built mainframe and
minicomputer hardware.