Sadly you missed the golden era for the Mac. Back in the PowerPC days there were lots of developers making fun and useful tweaks and there was a fair amount of configurability built in. It really was a professional's Unix OS back then. Over the past decade or so I've watched the possibilities narrow with every passing version.
Although I think throwaway is correct that that isn't what they meant, people do indeed lease land in the United States. It's more common in commercial real estate, but there are also (predatory, in my opinion) land leases for "manufactured" (i.e. mobile) homes where the resident buys the home but doesn't own the land under it.
Easy. I'm already envisioning all the ways this device could make my life easier. I would no longer have to juggle RFID keys to multiple clients' premises. I can lock and unlock my 1994 BMW that uses a long obsolete RF keyless entry system that is difficult to obtain replacement keys for. I can adjust my RF controlled lighting system at home without having to dig for the remote. So much of the world runs on RF that having a device that can speak to everything is invaluable.
What really irritated me was the suddenly imposed three device sync limit. Being forced to pay for 2 TB when I didn't need any more space than I already had just to get my files on all my computers really rubbed me the wrong way. Like you, I wish there was a 5 GB / $3/month plan.
On top of that, they're losing sight of the deep OS integration that made them so appealing to Steve Jobs. When a screenshot is automatically saved to Dropbox I'm no longer presented with the option to "Show in Finder" but instead "Show in Dropbox" which instead of snapping open a Finder window slowly launches their kludgy app that isn't at all visually or functionally harmonious with macOS.
Who's going to be the first startup out the door to try to sell "EARN IT" compliant encryption and lobby the government to recommend their product for "best practices" implementation?
Somewhere at Apple, a sysadmin noticed a suspicious amount of traffic to a dusty forgotten Xserve G4 in the corner of a datacenter at the old One Infinite Loop campus and finally pulled the plug, thus ending what was possibly world's highest-uptime instance of a Mac OS X Server 10.4 / WebObjects stack.