I think you're comparing the wrong things. When I was a kid, I tinkered with clocks and watches. I thought digital ones were opaque boxes and remember calling them boring. The mechanical clocks were much more fun and reconfigurable.

Does that mean we've sadly come to the end of the era of hobbyist friendly alarm clocks? Maybe, but so what? We then got computers instead. Now we have Raspberry Pi's for kids who see cellphones as boring black boxes. There's always something and it's fine if it's not the same thing it used to be. The same thing happened with cameras - people used to build their own cameras out of bits of wood and develop their own pictures from glass plates. but cheap film cameras eliminated that hobby from the mainstream. It's fine. Technology moves on. Now we have 3D printers that enable kids to make things they never could have before without access to an expensive milling machine.

I never liked to tinker with hardware. Tinkering with software was more fun, and the hardware that I can run my self-made software on is now more powerful than ever. Even an iPad, or rather, especially an iPad.