With DDR5 RAM prices skyrocketing, some mid-range laptops could soon ship with budget-level specs. TrendForce expects companies like Dell and Lenovo to stock more notebooks with 8GB of memory. These reasonably priced options may no longer handle intense office and gaming tasks.
With cloud computing you get someone (or at least some entity) to blame when things go wrong which apparently has some value too. Also, if you don’t need a lot of resources cloud can be cheaper than setting up whole infrastructure by yourself, but that has a ton of variables. Plus with cloud there’s often option for colocation/high availability/ddos protection and other stuff around which can be pretty expensive to build yourself.
Obviously if you try to shoehorn your current modrate sized esx/hyper-v/whatever environment to the cloud as is, that’s going to be expensive.
Yeah, my experience has been in the MSP space for small to medium companies. We’ve had tons of customers forego upgrading local hardware to go to a cloud provider, then have to do it in reverse a few years later when they realize they’ve already paid out the cost of their hardware and licensing agreement in hosting costs, and still have to keep paying to run the same systems.