HARDWARE UPGRADES SHOULD BE OBSOLETE

Back from my holiday, I'm reading some tech news via NNTP on my 
usual ~30 year old PC. I didn't bother to keep up with it using the 
~15yo EeePC, which I instead used to download old docos/films using
the free (but patchy) hotel WiFi, emails, and to break my word 
about my next ROOPHLOCH post being optically transmitted.

Windows 10 is about to go EOL next month and kill off a whole lot 
of vastly more powerful PCs than mine, which M$ don't want to run 
Win 11, by dropping 32bit support and adding completely silly 
hurdles like TPM 2.0 support and an old CPU blacklist. Linux 
developers are taking cues and talking about dropping 32 bit 
support soon too. FreeBSD plan to drop 32bit in their next major 
version.

But think about this for a moment. What are we all sick of hearing 
about from the IT industry for the last decade? "The Cloud". "The 
Cloud" does the processing now, so the hard work of running 
complicated software shouldn't be on your PC in the first place. 
Difficult data processing tasks and AI modelling are done "in The 
Cloud", and absolutely everything you save, regardless of 
sensibility, is supposed to be stored "in The Cloud". Your 4096K 
HyperspatialHD+ video decoding and encoding for upload/download 
to/from "The Cloud" is all done on GPUs now, so even that doesn't 
relate to these minimum CPU etc. requirements.

So who needs to be upgrading? Why aren't we talking about how 
Windows, Linux, and BSD don't need to support new desktop CPU 
features because client-side hardware doesn't need to be upgraded 
anymore? Why is that _new_ hardware support not spotlit as the 
massive waste of valuable OS developer time instead of occasionally 
tweaking old 32bit compatibility code every few years to keep it up 
with other changes?

I know, I know, it doesn't really work like that. Half the 
processing is really still done client-side in ever-clunkier 
Javascript downloaded to a huge oversized resource-hog of a Web 
browser every time you use it.  Then all the software just to start 
that browser mysteriously keeps getting bigger for no reason, so 
you need a super fast drive and RAM to load it all fast enough. And 
why not? After all, normal rich people that matter buy a new 
everything every couple of years just for looks/fun anyway.

But I still think the complete and utter hypocrisy of advertising 
"The Cloud", while forcing hardware upgrades on people through 
increased minimum requirements, needs highlighting. I, for one, 
refuse them both. Perhaps if that means the internet in general 
refuses me eventually, that won't be such a bad thing. Clearly by 
accepting such bullshit as this, internet users in general, ie. 
people in general, are being outed as complete fools.

 - The Free Thinker