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.
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.