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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

For a long time I thought the market would bifurcate again. With consumption devices at one end and creation devices at the other.

Sadly it looks that isn’t happening and we will end up with nothing more than a web browser on our desks and anything complex running in the cloud.

I don’t like this model at all and it isn’t about culture or nostalgia but rather the loss of control and agency.

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Hasn't it? I think you're looking up, when the split happened down. Phones and tablets for consumption, laptops and desktops for creation. When you need more oomf, temporary cloud resources. A decent linux box with a good monitor seems just like my old SPARC IPC. I have an optical mouse (wireless and any surface!), ctrl-alt-meta keys on both sides, a compiler suite and and an X server. 1989 is still here if you squint.

Why would you think that for a long time when the trend has clearly been towards where we are today? PC's kept getting more powerful and sophisticated architectures. Workstations never had a future. I remember even back in the 2000's personal workstations were considered legacy. PC's had networking capabilities that were more than enough for what many organizations were doing and they didn't want to support or purchase workstations.

Whether it is called a PC or a Workstation is immaterial, it's the capacity for work that is the distinction.

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