this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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This is going exactly as planned by big tech.
They dont want you to own your own hardware. They dont want local storage. They want to control EVERYTHING.
When personal computing is expensive enough, they will offer remote access to their server space, where you rent some specs and the screen (your computer access) is projected to you via internet.
Then they'll earn the subscription money, and they own every single log file and data on "your" computer.
As soon as this is the cheapest option by a margin, they WILL get costumers. No doubt. And it's awful.
Jeff Bezos even said this publicly, that this is the goal.
There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.
My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.
Her phone storage was full, so:
Google Photos is ransomware by definition.
I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.
Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.
I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.
I'll switch to legacy systems before I pay for a subscription service.
The only intense stuff I use is gaming. And I have no issue sticking with lower spec games that can run on a potato.
Big tech is making wayyyy to much money selling artificially inflated parts and pieces, Some people may buy into a second generation Web TV but gamers and builders won't. ( I know - I was there 3000 years ago when net nanny's were buying Web TV and I was selling Packard Bells with 4MB RAM).
This assumes really good internet infrastructure and still requires some sort of terminal at the user end. Of course, Bezos is a billionaire and so might be dumb enough to believe it himself.
They'll subsidize cheap locked down thin clients that can do jack shit by themselves except make an RDP connection to a VM.
I was going to say, thin clients are nothing new at all. And they're already practicing with thin terminal deliveries with TVs these days