I actually fear the opposite is true. The long term plan is to force everyone towards cheap dumb terminal systems, (imagine something like a Chromebook) so they can then rent processing power for individual tasks.

For example, Nvidia GeForce Now. You can play a AAA game on max settings on a piece of garbage laptop. Hell, you can even play it on an iPad. All you need to do is rent the processing power from Nvidia, and now you have the power of an RTX 5080 on all of your streaming-capable devices for only a few bucks a day. Easy, right?

But now imagine that for basically all of your computing. Need to edit a video? Oh that’ll be $30 a month to access Premier Pro’s cloud editing, where you stream the program from a server. Need Photoshop? Lucky for you, Adobe has a cloud package where you can stream your Photoshop sessions directly from Adobe’s servers. Only $40 per month. Need to do basically anything besides browse the internet? Might as well memorize your credit card number, because you’ll be needing it a lot.

Software-as-a-service is a blight and is inherently anti-consumer… But it is also where basically every large software company (and most small companies) are going nowadays. And renting processing power is simply SAAS taken to its logical conclusion.