Increased safety features on recent car models are a factor here as well. In the decade before I drove, airbags became standard, and weren’t even required until I’d been driving for a bit.
And over the last 10 years, NHTSA has pushed for stability control, 5 star crash test ratings, etc…
Then the whirlwind of safety over the last 5 years where back up cameras became required, and blind spot monitoring, brake assist, lane keep assist, adaptive cruise control all became available features.
You can still buy a car without those, for sure, and unfortunately that still costs $12k unless you want 200k miles or rebuilt titles.
But as I’m shopping for my kids first car, I find it hard to draw the line on what safety features she can have vs not have, and suddenly a few safety features later, used cars cost $20k. A far cry from my first car that I bought for $1k and drove in to the ground.
One word. Distros. If I want windows on a home computer, it’s windows. Maybe it’s Home or Professional, but it’s just fucking windows.
If I want linux at home, it’s Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or Slack or Cent or Mint or some other shit. Then I choose one and I want office and it’s not an option, so I google “office on linux” and it’s libreoffice or wayland or x.org or god forbid open office. Guess what I don’t want to do, explain that shit to my kids.
At work we have red hat and cent. If I’m spinning up private cloud computer it’s cent, if it’s public facing its red hat. No decisions to make. But then I have to research some arbitrary package and all the user guides are Debian based and like clockwork apt-get and rpm are inevitably different versions and installs to opt instead of /usr/local and just fuck.
Yea it’s come a long way, but home pcs need to operate brain dead simple point and click. Windows as successfully abstracted away every component of the concept of an operating system from 80% of end users, and 99% of the last 20% don’t want to deal with it off the clock.