I think you and I are probably in agreement there :) I would also wager, although obviously it's hard to say without hard data, that today's Macs are roughly as profitable as yesterday's Macs, and that today's design choices are at least partly a reflection of evolving materials, changing tastes, etc.

The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"

IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.