> I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.
I had CPUs since I've been alive, a faster one means very little to mean when the subsequent software is still trash.
It has been transformative for the insidious kind of lock-in that the post mentions.
Transformative sounds a bit exaggerated. It has a nice power consumption to compute power ratio, but it's not like order of magnitude above the rest.
A lot of the Apple Silicon magic is also due vertical integration with the OS IMHO.