And a bunch of these predictions never materialized. Subscription models are more widespread, but there's also more and better choices for opting out, and a much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in.
I didn't think it before, but I think it now: this is what kills general-purpose computing - subscriptions, and everything-as-a-Service in general. They make the actually important part of the offering gated and completely outside of your control. You're left holding an interface to a remote thing that can refuse to operate for any reason, including you trying to use a general-purpose computer to access it. This is not a hypothetical anymore.
> there's also more and better choices for opting out, and a much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in.
Mess around in, yes. Use in practice? Not quite. I think the most clear and worrying trend is remote/hardware attestation on mobile, in combination with subscription model / SaaS as mentioned above. The litmus test here is banking apps[0]. Banking is very much critical to life in the modern world, and banks are strongly pushing for having a mobile app as hard dependency[1] - and those apps make use of remote/hardware attestation. Ostensibly it's for your own safety, but as a side effect, you lose control over your own device. The use of those attestation APIs is accelerating[2].
In short: yes, you have a "much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in", but if you don't sign the right contracts and the platforms aren't properly locked down, "mess around" is all you're going to be able to do with it.
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[0] - Though I suppose the first real warning was gaming. DRM on media or games alone wasn't considered as worrying, because you could always find alternative source. But anti-cheat measures on multiplayer games are the first well-known DRM applied to an activity whose entire value sits in the network that's out of your control, and therefore not substitutable. You can't torrent a CoD or DotA multiplayer match.
[1] - Even if you use the web interface for everything, which many banks don't provide, there's a push for using the app as the auth tool - if you do, then the app becomes a hard dependency for you anyway.
[2] - The APIs are increasingly easy to use, increasingly promoted (at least in the Android world), and increasingly hard to hack - from what I read as an outsider, they've completely gutted the custom ROM scene for Android, as whatever cosmetics/QoL improvements you gain are not worth the functionality loss.
And a bunch of these predictions never materialized. Subscription models are more widespread, but there's also more and better choices for opting out, and a much richer variety of development targets and ecosystems to mess around in.