The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers.Then how do you explain the kinds of deliberate and obviously anti-customer behaviour I described before?
In some cases, a single dominant player is abusing their customers because they have a captive market. This is often the case with high-end equipment or software, because once someone has committed to using a certain product range the cost of switching is prohibitive.
In other cases, while there may not be active conspiracy, I can see no credible explanation for the way multiple suppliers all impose the same unnecessarily consumer-hostile policies unless there is a lack of effective competition such that those who offer consumers a better deal gain a commercial benefit from doing so.
Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air.
Completely modular in the sense of a tower PC case, of course not. But that doesn't mean they have to glue stuff together so even their own people can't easily repair a failed component.
As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.
Perhaps. But they mostly used to suck because there were no standards, so every device/software combination needed its own version of what we now call a device driver. There's no such excuse today.
Now the drivers suck because someone at the source made an active decision to screw their customers. How else do you explain a newer, much more powerful model of graphics card that somehow has severely degraded performance in some functions compared to a card of the previous generation, while much more expensive workstation cards using the same new generation of hardware under the hood do seem to exhibit the performance improvements one would expect?
And what other description is consistent with releasing a hardware device that should be useful for many years, yet not releasing drivers for it when Windows 7 comes out just a year or two later? It's not as if the arrival of Windows 7 was a surprise or the manufacturers don't know how to write Windows 7 drivers for their equipment. Chances are the next product range runs just fine on Windows 7 and its drivers are probably using a lot of the same driver code as before.
Obviously there is profit in these behaviours, because it forces customers to buy much more expensive high-end brands or to buy replacement equipment much sooner than they otherwise would have to.