alt Hacker NewsI see it as a long-term tradeoff on user freedom. You pay upfront for a capable hardware, you get your services running locally (you don’t pay subscriptions). Or you buy cheap hardware, you still need the same services “running in some cloud” for $X monthly. X goes up depending on the corporate bottom-line
In the history of cloud computing, prices have mostly only come down especially as inference becomes a commodity. Realistically, just looking at Mac prices, the cost of a computer with decent local inference would be around $6000 per person.
The world is not moving back to on prem.