Mighty is cheaper though.
At $30/month, Mighty would be $30 * 12 * 5 = $1800 over that time period.
I paid ~$2500 for this computer, and use it for:
1) Browsing 2) Coding 3) Video and photo editing 4) Graphic design
So all things considered, while yes it's literally cheaper in terms of direct dollar and cents comparison, in terms of functional ROI, given that this computer runs a browser instance with zero lag or latency at all, it's a no brainer to just invest in the good laptop vs going with Mighty.
The benchmark is not whether your existing computer breaks to pieces, but whether it can do that "1) Browsing 2) Coding 3) Video and photo editing 4) Graphic design" smoothly for the coming 5 years in the newest versions of popular applications, as they inevitably get more demanding for older hardware.
That being said, I don't think the SaaS-part of the value proposition is particularly convincing, and there barely is anything else.
And as you note a cloud browser only handles web browsing.
I would guess that I need a computer that has graphics acceleration to run the mighty client at a reasonable speed. I need at least enough memory locally to run the mighty client + the base OS it runs on.
My experience of using Zoom, Youtube, etc has been that video streaming is much more intensive than rendering text webpages, like hacker news, in a local browser instance. Maybe they're sending down local draw commands instead of actual video, which maybe helps some?
I wouldn't be surprised if the system requirements for Mighty are almost identical to the system requirements for Chrome with <150 tabs and an adblocker installed.
In reality, the $30/mo for mighty is on top of a computer, not instead of one, since you still need a computer _anyway_ to use Mighty.
I don't see system requirements listed on their website to compare chrome vs the mighty client, which honestly seems like a bit of an omission for something that talks so much about performance.
It's actually insanely expensive because most of us are going to still going to buy a computer and that $30/month ($327/year with discount) would have much more value for maxing out an M1 laptop.