From what I remember the aprocyphal story is that Intel dragged their feet on adopting EUV and instead tried to push multi-patterning past it's reasonable limits.
If that's the actual root cause, then Intel's lagging is due to optimizing their balance sheets (investors like low capital expenditures) at the expense of their technology dominance.
At this point Tiktok is getting more regulatory action against it than Facebook has....and Facebook's lax moderation spread the wildfire of genocide in Myanmar.
The counterpoint is that we don't need a new gimmick every year, and the companies that do chase new gimmicks (like Samsung and Xiaomi) do so at the expense of overall fit and finish.
However the magic really isn't gone. The Apple Pencil is a nice invention whose whole purpose is for creative endeavors.
Gradual refinement isn't a bad thing either. While this isn't a new invention, it definitely feels like magic to wake up, take my M1 Air everywhere I go, and not have to charge it again until I go to bed (even in 2024, I doubt I could do the same with a Dell XPS). The extra benefit is I have no gimmicky touch screen or never used 2in1 hinges to deal with as well.
There's no need for the crypto-fash comments about government safety nets causing the downfall of the west.
The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group).
It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this.
Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.
Japan is probably a good example for your rural to urban migration example.
Anecdotally I hear that the big cities like Tokyo are becoming more expensive (as everyone moves there) while smaller cities (<500,000 people) and rural areas are becoming cheaper, but I don't have a reference or data on hand for it.
Most credit cards pull the auto-payment either on the due date or the day before, which means that you have ~1 month to check your statements and file disputes/disable autopay in the event of anything unusual.
Life is about compromises. Sometimes people value a specific set of hardware and software support that comes with Apple devices even if they have to make certain trade-offs versus the competition.
At least in my case, I wasn't attracted to the iPhone because of forced Webkit and the Lightning port.
The renting analogy fits even less though. Renters have protections against evictions that don't exist for websites. If I break the rules of my lease it would take a month or 2 minimum to get kicked out. If I break Reddit's rules I can get banned immediately.
If that's the actual root cause, then Intel's lagging is due to optimizing their balance sheets (investors like low capital expenditures) at the expense of their technology dominance.