It is not a illusion, it is real and matter. Other thing that matter is confidentiality.
Of course things go obsolescent, that is a different matter.
Well, thatās definitely the case with Autodesk. When I switched from 3ds Max to Blender in the last pre-subscription period of Max I discovered that I couldnāt just sell my Max license. You donāt own the license, you own the rights to use it, and itās up to Autodesk to decide if theyāll allow a license transfer. You need to contact them, and probably only agree if the buyer agrees to upgrade to latest version, and buys a subscription.
I experienced similar sneakiness when I wanted to cancel my Adobe Photoshop subscription. Even though a year had passed, they charged a fine for early subscription cancellation. Luckily in Europe youāre allowed to cancel a subscription each month, so the fine wasnāt applicable, but they still tried it. If I hadnāt done some research, I could have paid the superfluous fine. 
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Iām in total agreeance with Midphase, and yāall have heard me echo the same here before, about how the future lays with cloud computing. Gone will be the days of needing purpose built loud, hot, energy sucking beast that are tied to a single work station/ location.
The future is with iPad (like) devices that are mobile and can dock with large monitors when needed, and which are powerful enough to handle 90% of creative task, but can still connect to a cloud infrastructure to handle ANY other computational heavy task.
As for bandwidthā¦ I know this is an international community, and Iām only talking with assumptions for the rest of the world but I hear Europe and other countries not in North America, internet speeds can be severely lacking and unreliable. And when you do have fast reliable internet it can be super expensive. Once again just from what I read.
But here in the US, home of the tech giants, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, ATT, Verizonā¦ fast internet (gigabit and above) is relatively cheap and available, at least in the major cities.
I live in the Dallas Ft, Worth metroplex and pay under $60 (51 Euro) for fiber (1GB down and up).
As the rest of the world improves their internet infrastructure cloud computing prices will become more available and prices will drop. And I havenāt even got into the advancements past 5G to be even more mobile.
I canāt wait for the day to carry my workstation around with me where ever I go, and dock where ever I need to. Iām mean weāre almost there right now. 
I have a subscription to Stadia and Iām blown away by how smooth the frame rate and 4K resolution that games run at. Running a 3D viewport in realtime isnāt too different than running some of these super graphically intensive games.
This tech is still newish and can only get better.
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The one thing Iām most afraid of is waking up one day, and finding out I canāt use my computer because gophers ate through the fiber line.
Donāt laugh. That actually happened here once.
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Not to mention the big server farms being prone to issues considering the tech industryās āmove fast and break thingsā approach to software, do recall that Facebook had a 5 hour outage just recently.
I do get the value in the idea of connecting to a server that you know will get more powerful hardware on an annual basis, but then again the result is you paying by the month for the privilege of even using a machine that is useful for more than internet, email, and general light gaming and computing tasks (if you end up having a financial crisis, then you can say goodbye to creating anything more sophisticated than colored pencils on paper or watercolors).
I would also not forget the arrival of heterogenous computing, which will allow personal machines to ramp the power consumption way down if you are not rendering anything or playing any games. The best of both worlds would be to have a automated connection to a server (OS level) you can pay for while still having a powerful box yourself (if you wanted to get into things that more or less require as much power as you can throw at it, like high resolution fluid simulation or animation rendering).
Then something else I thought about, having your workstation wherever you go doesnāt exactly mean you have to get used to just using a dumb client to a server. There is no reason why you canāt leave your home PC running when you are away and then you log into it to use it from afar. This type of thing was already shown to work with an app. call Log Me In, which unfortunately did the (now infamous) Imageshack move of converting your account to a trial version, unless you paid a steep subscription price.
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This. I look forward to cloud computing as an addition to what we already have, not as some whole new paradigm for computer usage that replaces our current setups outright.
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These are good argumentsā¦ I canāt wait to see what direction everything goes towards or if there is even one unified way.
Maybe a home workstation with āremoteingā in if desired, but if you canāt afford or choice to go the cloud route that is a reliable option too.
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Donāt forget thereās still an environmental benefit as well. The reason for that being that it allows your current production hardware to be stretched a lot further due to the cloud connection (initially) being far cheaper than buying a new box. What that means is you will be able to defer a full upgrade by up to several years. If that extrapolated to everyone, then that means a lot less E-waste worldwide.
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Did yall just forgot most US isp have a datacap of 1tb permonth and exceeding that would incur additional fee?
Internet is pretty reliable here.
I prefer Files (my Work) and Apps locally and perpetual though.
Could be that I get financial problems at one point.
To know i could no more access my own work at any time when I
have to stop any subscription, for any reason, is horror for me.
If Subscription/Cloud only gets reality - I would switch to OSS
and Blender and live with all limitations.
So far I was able to avoid all that.
I have all my Apps redundant. Not because of fear but out of interest and
excitement. 2x CAD, 2x 3D, 1-3x realtime ā¦ Which is quite tedious.
Maybe I would even feel alleviated with the limitations of Linux andOSS only,
but only a single App for each task.
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I currently only have Blender, DesignSpark Mechanical for CAD and my 3D printing, Resolve for video editing outside Blender, Krita for image.
I would get a Linux, but i need my laptop to have 3dsmax possibility opened for some comissioned work and some games.
I agree with you guys regarding more cloud-based computing. Ironically, Apple seems to lag behind in that area. Iām still eagerly awaiting the possibility of logging into a single iCloud-based iOS configuration that covers everything, Chrome OS style, so youāre working with the very same, fully synchronized environment on your iPhone and iPad.
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Perhaps Apples does not want āMac OS 365ā as you could use it on non apple hardware 
I found it interesting that Windows365 is limited to 16 GB of RAM for example.
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I love your humor 
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Hm I would rather say US customers are victim to Monopols and price gouging
I can select between Comcast or ATT and I pay 70$ to 80$ for basic high speed internet (600 Mbit line)
In Europe Germany you get a lot more for that money including digital TV.
It is good that in your city you get a good deal but that is more an exception than the norm.
Having more than one option makes it by definition not a monopoly. 
600MB isnāt 1GB and with cable you also run into the upload speeds usually being significantly less and since we are talking about this in terms of future cloud rendering with live viewports faster uploads speeds would be a thing. 
I pay $60 for 1GB up and 1GB down fiber.
I cut the cord for cable TV content about 8 years ago and will probably never go back.
Overall my point wasnāt to say, āhey look what I get nah nah nah nahā but more so that prices are coming down in the US and fiber is becoming available in more and more places. Which in turns makes the argument for cloud work more possible.
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I live in one of those rare exception rural towns that has access to a speedy fiber line. I have the choice between 500Mb, and 1Gb up and down, of which I have the former. Honestly, I havenāt found many reasons to justify paying the extra $25 a month for the full 1Gb connection.
I have yet to manage to fully saturate the bandwidth to my house, and believe me, Iāve tried. Plus, I think I could count the number of times on one hand that Iāve come close to the theoretical 62 MB/s max download speed, usually only averaging about half that on a good connection.
Even with cloud computing, I canāt think of a good reason to go for a full gig over a 500Mb connection unless you can get it for a nice price. Things will probably be different 5-10 years from now, but at this very moment, itās not worth the extra cost to me.
That sounds great! Even better if the need for GB ethernet isnāt needed. But we all here sound like we are old enough to remember 3/5MB coming on the scene after 56Kā¦ I can still hear the people saying, ā3MB? weāll never use that much bandwidth.ā And of course AT&T sticking with 10MB DSL for ages after cable 30MB became the norm.
I too have the option for the 600GB fiber for $15 less but I had never had GB so Iām paying the extra with no regrets.
Iām old enough to remember watching a friend of mine download a song off of Napster on his brand new, just released DSL connection at 150kb/s. That was BLAZING SPEED!
Nowadays, if I dip below 15 meg a second, I get whiny. I mean, comeon! Itās only a 3 gig file! This shouldnāt take 10 minutes!
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Downloading Blender for me has been a strangely slow transfer. It typically takes about 15 minutes even though my download speeds from other sites like Blackmagic or SideFX are considerably faster.