Prediction: YC startup Mighty will be new default infrastructure as web VIP pass

This is a terrific idea that's been around since about 1995 when the idea of an "internet appliance" first started to get tossed around for enterprise desktops. Clearly, neither the bandwidth nor server power was there back then to make it real.

As someone who plays MS Flight Simulator (which requires hardware nobody has; the graphics are streamed to you) and also streams games like Forza from my own Xbox, I can tell you that the hardware is there now. It is quite possible to run even a high frame rate, graphically intensive game fully remote and not notice any difference at all than playing on hardware in front of you. It's real, now.

Mighty's claims for improving the browser experience sound totally plausible. After all, it's a lot harder to do near real time overlays of photogrammetry (like MSFS) than it is to render a typical web page. MS is already showing that this "harder rendering" can be done in the cloud and streamed to you faster than it can be done on your own machine.

I agree with the OP and PG that some version of this is the future of computing. Already, people are hesitant to upgrade hardware because there isn't any real increase in performance. I myself have owned every Xbox since they were invented but I didn't buy a Series X yet. Why? There is no improvement on the games I actually play. (When Forza 5 comes out, this will change and I'll be a customer again.)

Same with the desktop, I have a three year old laptop that will run Windows 11 and I wouldn't get any improvements out of changing it. The better computer of the future lives on a box that you don't own -- just like the mainframes of the past that I worked on and enjoyed so much.