Many people talking about buying Macs or iPads on this thread. Ok, I get it. But, GNU/Linux is a very good option for everyone. GNU/Linux is not at all as difficult as it used to be. If you want to be able to support you folks without flying to Arizona, how about ssh and X forwarding? (Although, you should still visit your folks more.) How about the fact that 12+ year old hardware still works wonderfully with a GNU/Linux OS, and not getting your folks on the 5-year release cycle Apple wants you on? Anyway…

I understand the OP’s concerns, and I feel the same way. Technology has, for my entire life, done nothing but throw more and more mud in my face. Without a doubt, there are people here on HN who are contributing to this problem; and, where no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood, we as a community are the ones complicit in this “make the little graph go up” scheme the money-bugs have beset upon the world. I see this stemming from the core issue, related to my GNU/Linux side-bar at the top of this post, is that there isn’t actually money to be made off custom software. If there was ever a time this was true, it is long over.
Companies make money:
1)selling things, and software makes those things cheaper
2)selling things, and software makes selling those things cheaper
3)selling information, and software makes gathering that information cheaper
4)selling information, and software makes that information creation feasible
5)selling art, and software is the medium

Where 4&5 are in that realm of “selling custom software”, I believe that these are rank ordered in terms of profitability and that 4&5’s profitability is directly tied to the ability to properly exploit 3.

To restate the OP’s position, technology is not fun anymore. So, dare I say again that we all are complicit in this awful way of doing business. It’s not fun and it’s not fun because we have to make money. And it’s not fun because we can only make money if we’re doing one of these things I’ve listed (there may be more, but this is a comment, not an article). And, so, we have to make money by making life worse for people who use our technology. We have to make money to live. We have to make peoples lives worse… in order to live. We live off the suffering of others…
This is the most sadistic realization. “But, isn’t that the natural order? Eating things to survive?” asked noone, because nobody reading a comment section would ever be so thoughtful. No, we don’t eat our fellow man. Instead, here, we torment the each other and the elderly with beeps-and-boops, pop-up adds for cheap consumer goods make by slaves, surveillance and targeted manipulations, and scary threats of scam artistry.
And, as the OP says, we leave consumers to feel like it is their fault for not buying a $2,500 Apple, or accepting a 700-page EULA, or gasp not following ever god-damned detail of computing news and technology so that they can defend themselves for our injudiciousness onsLaUHTt Of EvER NeW WAyS TO SQUEEZE THEM FOR EVERY DAMNED PENNY!!!11 maniacal laughter continues for several moments, before awkwardly subsiding
I could try to pretend that capitalism is ”the problem” or that we could “solve this” with better security and privacy laws. I’ve become to fatalist for that. If there’s a source of food, nature evolves something to consume it and if there’s a source of profit, the market “social evolution”s a way to extract it. So, I see no hope here. And, as is my experience working with software people over the last 30 years, we are truly awful social rejects anyway who do not exalt compassion or empathy as well as being a people who marvel in how dumb everyone else is and how masterfully we can create our techno-world better than God could