I think the point the author was trying to make is that the “personal” part of PC is what is dying. the profit model for modern tech is no longer about supplying the best or most useful product but instead exploiting users, either to manipulate them into buying more crap or harvesting their data to sell off to someone else who wants to sell them more crap. Even many of the products we buy these days we don’t really own. Steam just released a policy statement saying that users don’t actually own the games they’ve purchased, but are merely buying a license to access them. If Steam decides not to support a particular title anymore than poof, it’s gone forever from your account. For the most part it seems that if you aren’t running strictly FOSS software or pirating, you can’t really own anything on your PC aside from the hardware. I think the gist of their argument is not that computing has gotten worse, but that while software, hardware, and user experience have massively improved, the exploitation of the user has greatly tainted that progress.