Mobsters will always try to gain and then enforce a monopoly with violence. They don’t want any competition. Mobsters want to control the price in high margin business.

Depending on how they operate, they will also scam people, sell low value real estate at high prices, etc. Being organized means they are much harder to catch.

There‘s existing infrastructure, that runs on hardware from the 1980s. Especially in industrial applications there are still plenty of gigantic machines controlled by a 386 or a C-64.

The used vintage market can keep these running for a long time. Eventually you replace them with an emulator or an FPGA that runs the same software.

Big banking, insurance, airlines, shipping, governments, militaries bought huge IBM mainframes from the 1960s onwards. They ran for decades. Many of these were transformed into virtual machines, still running their ancient FORTRAN code.

There’s also the story of (IIRC Minutemen) nuclear missiles needing 5.25 floppies to program their guidance systems. These were still operational in the early 2000s. Lots of military weapons systems run on ancient hardware.

Manufacturers only have a limited capacity of production and want to make money. It’s a much better business to sell all your production’s capability for a few months to one customer for a fixed price, instead of selling to thousands of small customers for a highly volatile price. In the worst case you produce stuff, you can’t sell or have to sell at a loss. A factory standing still and not producing is also expensive.

A factory with all machines running, all people working, all product selling at a good price is the ideal state for a manufacturer to be in.

Big customers bring stability and predictable profits.

Production capacity for in demand products will increase over time. Likely these same manufacturers‘ profits will be invested in more production capacity, optimizations, cost savings, etc.

In a few years this will result in cheaper and available consumer products.

General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!

Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.

If you actually make serious money with your work computer, then paying 8k for a machine will pay for itself over a few months.