[DonGateley]

The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever.

There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.

Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.

[YokoZar]

Alternatively, computing power will get so cheap and easy to distribute that myriad small devices will be fetching saved data from the cloud and running the app locally with all the better latency that entails.

[dredmorbius]

Much as I appreciate a fat (Linux) client, the challenge is less device cost than administration.

The Android + Cloud model gives you a highly uniform user client which access all the fiddly bits in the Cloud. Until there's an absolutely bulletproof way of providing those services at the individually-provisioned level, that's going to win out for the vast majority of the public.

I'm not saying that the services have to remain as centralized as they are presently -- with Google owning everything (though this provides certain efficiencies). A more federated model in which there are multiple app and/or service providers to choose from _could_ come into being, and the present surveillance environment might help such an environment emerge, but the efficiencies of size and scale (as well as the very thin margins of such services) make this a stretch.

I've been watching a number of projects, most notably FreedomBox, for some time. They're pretty much precisely what you've described: cheap, self-contained, self-provisioning systems based around Linux (usually Debian and its excellent provisioning system), but there's been little noise out of the projects and progress seems slow at best.

If I could run my own servers (on an existing high-speed and highly reliable connection) without much hassle, it really would be quite attractive.