I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
I mean, with 5G, I think its possible to make it seamless. And I think corporations push for this because they would love to have your data in the cloud, both for surveillance, and to charge a subscription for storage. I think this enshittifications would eventually happen to digital storage.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
So how likely will this dystopian future happen?
I’d predict a 90% chance of this happening, and almost everyone would be okay at first, until they start overcharging for cloud storage subscriptions, but by then it’d be too late, there’d be a monopoly.
“You would own nothing and you’d be happy”
I’m fed up with that bullshit phrase. Please, stop parroting it. And, even if it became true… You’ll be happy, which is more than 90% of humanity could hope for.
It’s pretty funny how I’ve seen posts exactly like this one 10-15 years ago, and nothing has really changed that much from a consumer perspective.
It’s just simply cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient to have local storage.
If you dug into history - with computers in the 70s-80s, we used to remotely dial into another computer. The terminal at your school (as home computers were pretty expensive) would dial into a stronger computer and you’d use up their resources.
Every few years, I see that mentality coming back. Cloud computing. Chromebooks. Remote desktops. Stadia and gaming on-demand.
Its fascinating.
Wait, we had networking like that in the 70s? I’ve never heard that, do you have any other specific information I can look up? A computer at a school talking to another school remotely to use its processing power in the 70s sounds like alternate reality. That’s literally just the internet. What were they pushing the data over? Surely not phone lines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
Terminals sent keystrokes to the mainframe, and the mainframe sent text back to the terminal. They used modems and serial connections
If by “seamless” you mean that wireless data speeds can soon match locally attached storage, there will still remain a political question of autonomy. We might some day have light terminals without storage or even serious processors with all the data and work still done in our cellars garages and and attics via 8G or whatever grade connection. If there will be enough demand for market and politics for devices to be available, of course. So yeah, I think, culture and politics hold the answer.
I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
It will get close to happening for nearly all computing, then it will swing back the other way to local storage and compute, then after 15-20 years it will swing back toward centralized compute and storage. This has already happened 3 times.
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Original computing was mainframes. “Dumb terminals” that had zero local storage and only the most rudimentary compute power to handing the incoming data and display it, and take keystrokes, encode them, and send them on.
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Then “personal computers” became a thing with the advent of cheap CPUs. Dumb Terminals/mainframes were largely discarded and everyone had their own computer on their desk with their won compute and storage. Then the Netware/Banyan era began and those desktop computers were networked to have some remote shared storage. (there’s a slightly different branching with Sun/HPUX/DigitalUnix and Workstation grade hardware)
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Then Citrix WinFrame and Sun Ray stateless thin clients showed up once again swinging the compute and storage almost entirely remotely to centralized heavy powered servers with (mostly) dumb terminals, but these were graphic interfaces like MS Windows or Xwindow.
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Once again, powerful desktop CPUs showed up with the Pentium II etc compute was back under users desks.
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Now phones and tablets with cloud has show up, and you’re asking the question.
So what I think will swing primary compute and storage back to the user side (handheld now) is again, cheap compute and storage on the device. Right now so many services are cloud based because the massive compute and storage requirements only exist in volume in the cloud. However, bandwidth is still limited. Imagine when the next (next?) generation of mobile CPUs arrive, and with a tiny bit of power you could do today’s bitcoin mining on your phone or process AI datasets with ease in the palm of your hand. And why would you send the entire dataset to the cloud when you can process it locally and then send the result?
So the pendulum keeps swinging; centralized and distributed, back and forth.
Yeah the mass of goo will probably embrace it for the convenience, and the resistant few will be demonized as likely terrorists and go underground. I can see a Republican US Congress passing an Online Freedom Act that bans private storage over the amount needed to run Windows or MacOS and blaming viruses on Linux and Mexicans.
Local storage will always be needed in business environments, either for security reasons (sensitive files that can’t go online), or technical (speed requirements or offline access).
