And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...

Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.

My recollection is that some combination of stimulus checks / COVID dynamics made it much harder to hire low wage workers, so employers were "forced" to raise wages in response. At the same time, higher wage workers who got "normal" raises were not keeping up with inflation.

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-job-growth-picks-up-may-...

From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.

Articles like this one annoy me so much, where is clear the author started with a premise and backfilled the "evidence". The New Yorker would never publish this kind of speculative innuendo if the article was for example about vaccine hesitancy, so it's frustrating to see that stanard relaxed for other topics.

TBF, I think the same can be said for something like Apple's "commitment" to privacy, in that their own ads business never took off so they leaned into their edge over Google.