Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can't be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

Something similar to this concept is great for enterprise environments. Imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client that just connects to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. That is already a widespread concept. But for a home PC, with that VM being run on the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.

Penny-pinching companies love to give the absolute bare minimum equipment to their employees

Given all the attempts at eroding tech freedom, this might end up being future computing, but the cloud is state-controlled.

I'm not using it even if someone is paying me (unless someone hacks the firmware, but that's a different story)

Enough capital can reshape even a somewhat free market into a non-free one - if we, the demand, have basically no other choice (except revolt, but we forgot/got that erased from our consciousness) we usually just try to survive.

The mythos about how things are getting better for each generation of humans is false.