My home printer was more expensive than an HP because they don't have an abusive ink sales business model. Artificially linking a business model to refills or subscriptions has always been a choice. It's just a worse choice now.

A lot of my clients have a need for partly embedded software, and partly applications. That's always been more remunerative than strictly app level software. The change I have observed since last year is that the app part can get a lot more ambitious and user-friendly on the kind of budget hardware makers allocate for that.