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.
People also know what cloud gaming means now.
If that device loses service, it’s just a fancy paper weight until some nerd on GitHub spends a month rooting it and writing homebrew.
But people are also fucking stupid, so… They’ll buy anything, just sell it.
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
Cooooollllllll! It’s like computer morse code
Yup, it’s why ASCII has weird characters like “carriage return” and “bell”
Etymology of ascii characters is something I never even considered. New hobby unlocked
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.
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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).
Good point, I didn’t even consider business.
It’s why SD cards are still relevant. A professional photographer takes thousands of photos during a wedding and needs to process them in a computer. Cloud is not feasible or economical.
It’s already happening. Microsoft’s push to onedrive and m365 was to get everyone off of legacy apps.
Next will be ARM devices that have a multi-day battery because it’s all just cached apps accessing your cloud-saved data.
AFAIAC, all that that achieved was to push me off of those MS products.
I’m split. Outlook and other apps have turned into pigs but have very little competition to force innovation. Customers are just as complacent, and demand things not change at all.
Moving to PWA web apps has turned the industry around. MS is dumping all of the old code that causes so many issues.
I find other IT people expecting MS to not make even small changes, while also complaining about battery life and app reliability.
I’m looking forward to New Outlook. Supporting HTML and https is so much easier than map I and legacy client code with dirty plugins.
I think we’re already there but not in the way OP describes. People haven’t had great experiences with Chrimebooks and storage is cheap
Think of your Google drive, OneDrive or Apple drive. The most common scenario is you use local storage for reliability and responsiveness, but it’s always aynching to the cloud. Many of your files may not even exist in local storage but it looks like it does
Or consider Apples approach to photo storage. You can choose to use iCloud for photo storage and it keeps only a thumbnail on local storage. Your basic browse and search operations are reliable and responsive, and but you download the full photo as you need it
There has been a ping pong between emphasis on the server or emphasis on the client since the beginning.
In the near future, there will likely be a trend to private / self-hosted clouds (instead of vendor clouds) for enterprise and enthusiasts that want data access in multiple locations. But at some point, all data could be local but synced to all your devices. That may be the ultimate client/server balance.
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.
Seamless as in, the internet at such a hypothetical future would be so reliable, that if the software didn’t tell you it was actually cloud storage, you’d believe its actually local storage.
Almost definitely not at all. There’s just too much latency, due to the speed of light. Local storage will always be faster than cloud, by a huge margin, unless you’re using an incredibly slow medium.
Yep, SSD latency is measured in tens of microseconds. To achieve that kind of latency with a cloud service, you’d need it to be just a few kilometers away or the light propagation delay alone becomes too great.
Idea: In the future where wireless network speeds are high, the OS image just gets loaded into RAMdisk each time.
Marketing: You get the newest OS image on every boot, with all current security patches and no (3rd party) malware, as that would be wiped with each reboot. This will also allow for even higher performance than any SSD.It better keep a local backup so it can boot in low coverage areas. Of course that would mildly compromise the security aspect
You can take my 100TB storage array from my cold, dead, hands.
“Sergeant, deploy the cryo ray.”
Can I really? I won’t murder you for it, I am willing to wait.
Oh don’t worry, they’ll cite “national security concerns” and claim that you are storing stolen classified information in order to plan for “terrorist activity”.
There will be a no knock warrant, they’ll kick open the door, shoot anything that moves. And they will take it away from your cold, dead, hands.
Aren’t there enough real problems in the world to focus on without the need to go inventing more? This is just imaginative rage bait. Focus on real shit that’s actually happening.
Or more likely, desktop OSes will be locked down and will simply not be able to use it, while bank websites and other stuff will only work with locked down OSes.
For your security of course.
have you tried moving to Linux?
Cant move to linux when in 2030 they make every BIOS/UEFI locked, just like some android manufacturers have already been locking bootloaders.
Then don’t buy those products. I only buy phones I can unlock and install my own version of Android on. Same with computers and iot. If I can’t install my own software then I didn’t own it.
If megacorps have their way, you won’t be able to use banking, government, social media, etc. if you aren’t running their proprietary slop.
See Google’s Attestation API attempt. Computers can become like smsrtphones are right now.
You can always have a burner “secure” device for official business, and a privacy-respecting device for everything else.
“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.
And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.
Cloud storage will only last till they get a monopoly then when they start charging through the nose when they start the Enshittification phase . The scramble for local storage will begin but by that time they will outlaw it or some other bullshit
Theoretically you can host everything at home. You just need a connection that is fast enough.
That’s still local storage if you are the one that owns the hard drives
It’s more self hosted cloud storage in so far as it’s not at all local to the device.
I would say it is unlikely - storage is so cheap that some form of local storage is likely to stay.
A terminal device still needs some form of storage to run the software to access the cloud. That might end up being some small storage on a chip but the difference is not between none and something, but some and more.
I also think there are enough people who want storage they own and control that it’ll persist as a concept. Also having devices that work when networks are down is a benefit in itself - attempts to make devices dumb terminals get exposed as a productivity nightmare when networks do go out.
I think big business will certainly try hard to lock people in to their ecosystems. Remote storage, remote computing/graphics processing are all ways they will try. But conversely there are vibrant communities pushing independent & private alternatives that I don’t see dying - whether thats Linux on PCs, or Graphene OS to take control of your android device etc.
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Likely, never due to the three storage backup rule: save on local device, save on external, and save one copy on cloud. So you don’t lose your work or media.
