No Stupid Questions

It's pretty funny how I've seen posts exactly like this one 10-15 years ago, and nothing has really changed that much from a consumer perspective.

It's just simply cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient to have local storage.

Almost definitely not at all. There's just too much latency, due to the speed of light. Local storage will always be faster than cloud, by a huge margin, unless you're using an incredibly slow medium.

You can take my 100TB storage array from my cold, dead, hands.

I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.

It will get close to happening for nearly all computing, then it will swing back the other way to local storage and compute, then after 15-20 years it will swing back toward centralized compute and storage. This has already happened 3 times.

• Original computing was mainframes. "Dumb terminals" that had zero local storage and only the most rudimentary compute power to handing the incoming data and display it, and take keystrokes, encode them, and send them on.

• Then "personal computers" became a thing with the advent of cheap CPUs. Dumb Terminals/mainframes were largely discarded and everyone had their own computer on their desk with their won compute and storage. Then the Netware/Banyan era began and those desktop computers were networked to have some remote shared storage. (there's a slightly different branching with Sun/HPUX/DigitalUnix and Workstation grade hardware)

• Then Citrix WinFrame and Sun Ray stateless thin clients showed up once again swinging the compute and storage almost entirely remotely to centralized heavy powered servers with (mostly) dumb terminals, but these were graphic interfaces like MS Windows or Xwindow.

• Once again, powerful desktop CPUs showed up with the Pentium II etc compute was back under users desks.

• Now phones and tablets with cloud has show up, and you're asking the question.

So what I think will swing primary compute and storage back to the user side (handheld now) is again, cheap compute and storage on the device. Right now so many services are cloud based because the massive compute and storage requirements only exist in volume in the cloud. However, bandwidth is still limited. Imagine when the next (next?) generation of mobile CPUs arrive, and with a tiny bit of power you could do today's bitcoin mining on your phone or process AI datasets with ease in the palm of your hand. And why would you send the entire dataset to the cloud when you can process it locally and then send the result?

So the pendulum keeps swinging; centralized and distributed, back and forth.

“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.

And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.

Yeah the mass of goo will probably embrace it for the convenience, and the resistant few will be demonized as likely terrorists and go underground. I can see a Republican US Congress passing an Online Freedom Act that bans private storage over the amount needed to run Windows or MacOS and blaming viruses on Linux and Mexicans.

Cloud storage will only last till they get a monopoly then when they start charging through the nose when they start the Enshittification phase . The scramble for local storage will begin but by that time they will outlaw it or some other bullshit

I would say it is unlikely - storage is so cheap that some form of local storage is likely to stay.

A terminal device still needs some form of storage to run the software to access the cloud. That might end up being some small storage on a chip but the difference is not between none and something, but some and more.

I also think there are enough people who want storage they own and control that it'll persist as a concept. Also having devices that work when networks are down is a benefit in itself - attempts to make devices dumb terminals get exposed as a productivity nightmare when networks do go out.

I think big business will certainly try hard to lock people in to their ecosystems. Remote storage, remote computing/graphics processing are all ways they will try. But conversely there are vibrant communities pushing independent & private alternatives that I don't see dying - whether thats Linux on PCs, or Graphene OS to take control of your android device etc.

It’s already happening. Microsoft’s push to onedrive and m365 was to get everyone off of legacy apps.

Next will be ARM devices that have a multi-day battery because it’s all just cached apps accessing your cloud-saved data.

Likely, never due to the three storage backup rule: save on local device, save on external, and save one copy on cloud. So you don't lose your work or media.

Unlikely, as cloud storage providers can't be trusted completely. They be like "but it's encrypted. trust me bro", but every time they get the chance, like when a weakness is detected in the cipher, they will peek or let some government peek. This is how magically your competitor ends up with your business secrets.

Like others I don't see it happening but I could see a fast persistant storage merging ram and disk into one feature.

I don't see that as likely until 10gbps connections are the norm

"You would own nothing and you'd be happy"

This is a misinterpreted quote that led to a bunch of bullshit conspiracy theories by people who have not actually listened to the whole thing, such as what you're spewing here btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset#Conspiracy_theories

I still consider a microSD card a must for my portable devices so I can hoard media locally.

But I pay for a cloud backup of anything I produce.

I think we’re already there but not in the way OP describes. People haven’t had great experiences with Chrimebooks and storage is cheap

Think of your Google drive, OneDrive or Apple drive. The most common scenario is you use local storage for reliability and responsiveness, but it’s always aynching to the cloud. Many of your files may not even exist in local storage but it looks like it does

Or consider Apples approach to photo storage. You can choose to use iCloud for photo storage and it keeps only a thumbnail on local storage. Your basic browse and search operations are reliable and responsive, and but you download the full photo as you need it

There has been a ping pong between emphasis on the server or emphasis on the client since the beginning.

In the near future, there will likely be a trend to private / self-hosted clouds (instead of vendor clouds) for enterprise and enthusiasts that want data access in multiple locations. But at some point, all data could be local but synced to all your devices. That may be the ultimate client/server balance.

For me, never.