The shift to the cloud has turned computers into glorified terminals again. For terminals CPU power is a lot less important than for a personal computer.
Have to disagree here. Cloud apps (in a form of web apps) demand more CPU performance, not less! Apart from specialized apps that really do a lot of computing (rendering, modelling, model-training) that can easily be done in cloud, most apps are slower (or functionally constrained) if they're moved to cloud and used as web app. Think Office 365 suite - every app of the suite is either slower as web app, or functionally constrained.
For me personally, web apps only got fast when I got a computer with M1 processor.
I understand the argument but I don't think that's enough – even on a recent Intel laptop CPU, you'll be hearing the fans if you have more than one of Outlook, Teams, etc. active or any enterprise security software even if most of the data is being stored on the cloud. Something like iOS or ChromeOS is a lot closer to delivering on that idea in my experience.
> I understand the argument but I don't think that's enough – even on a recent Intel laptop CPU, you'll be hearing the fans if you have more than one of Outlook, Teams, etc. active or any enterprise security software even if most of the data is being stored on the cloud.
Google Docs runs well on a Chromebook. As does MS Office online. The modern desktop has really turned into a terminal - it's jut using HTML & JS and works... pretty well.
Yeah, that’s why I said Office users — the core experience isn’t bad at all any more. It’s usually other apps which are pushing CPU limits notably. A big one recently has been video conferencing since a lot of schools didn’t used to need that at all, much less large classes entirely online.
Video conferencing works really well on a $200 Chromebook or $100 tablet.
Indeed, WordPerfect, word, excel, etc, all worked just fine on a pentium chip of the day. Yes there was always something faster but really… it was just fine.
This is certainly plausible if these were mostly Office users but how confident are you that you'd know if they did notice? Most of the large IT departments I've interacted with would post glowing self-evaluations while the users had plenty of complaints and/or were doing their real work on personal devices. Depending on how the business is structured and the relationships, this can be hard to measure without a fair amount of effort — I've heard people say they weren't going to report something because they didn't think it was worth the effort or they were sure that the IT people would notice and fix it.