In Ellen Ullman's book Life in Code, she writes about Whitfield Diffie's (of Diffie-Hellman fame) speech at the 2000 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Toronto.

> "We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again."

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Smart people like Diffie saw this happening more than 20 years ago.

It's really made me rethink web apps that don't need to be web apps (including stuff like electron). Like you said, Microsoft has thrown in the towel and it seems now Apple is really the only platform making a compelling argument for native apps and keeping the computer smart.