This is stupid. Latency (which can't be reduced below the speed of light without circumventing the laws of physics) is incredibly detrimental to drawing and digital painting, two of Photoshop's most popular use cases. A frame or two of lag really hurts responsiveness (a frequent concern when using a large brush on a slow PC), and network latency to nearby servers in the US starts at around 30ms and only gets worse. Client side prediction helps a lot in video games, but predicting a graphics editor basically entails having the entire editor, at which point the "cloud" is doing nothing but storing your files.
I will never understand why people are so obsessed with the extreme of the thin client ideal. They are a good choice in a world where the network is fast and low latency, while client devices are underpowered and expensive (VT100s in a lab with minicomputer in the next room). Meanwhile, we've lived for at least the past two decades in a world where the network (on the cellular and home broadband ends) is slow and high latency but our client devices are incredibly powerful and cheap. The period of time where this makes any sense for anyone except for proprietary software vendors that want to close off any possibility of pirating their products has long since passed.
The appeal of "compute clusters" for most "power user" tasks especially diminishes when you realize that shitty off-the-shelf PCs from 10+ years ago were perfectly capable of running programs that did most of same stuff as their modern versions. New functionality has been added, of course, but most of the increase in resource requirements came from selfish programming from generations of programmers that never learned how to optimize. There's no reason that a Chromebook with a cheapo ARM or low-end Intel SoC shouldn't be able to natively run a better optimized graphics program like Paint Tool Sai with CPU time/battery to spare.
Agreed. But only if that's how it's implemented (essentilly VNC to a centralized app). But if it runs code locally, then latency should be fine. I've not seen any details on what they're actually providing, so it's hard to tell what they're offering. I'd assume it's a continuation of their "creative cloud" offering, which as far as I know, caches the application code (and assets) locally?
The article and comments ITT suggest that it is not like the existing "Creative Cloud", but instead works like VNC, or perhaps renders UI locally while doing all the actual image editing on a server. If it was all client code, there's no way it would run acceptably on cheapo Chromebooks (because Photoshop is a behemoth, mind, not because it's inherently impossible to edit graphics on a low-end device).
I will never understand why people are so obsessed with the extreme of the thin client ideal. They are a good choice in a world where the network is fast and low latency, while client devices are underpowered and expensive (VT100s in a lab with minicomputer in the next room). Meanwhile, we've lived for at least the past two decades in a world where the network (on the cellular and home broadband ends) is slow and high latency but our client devices are incredibly powerful and cheap. The period of time where this makes any sense for anyone except for proprietary software vendors that want to close off any possibility of pirating their products has long since passed.
The appeal of "compute clusters" for most "power user" tasks especially diminishes when you realize that shitty off-the-shelf PCs from 10+ years ago were perfectly capable of running programs that did most of same stuff as their modern versions. New functionality has been added, of course, but most of the increase in resource requirements came from selfish programming from generations of programmers that never learned how to optimize. There's no reason that a Chromebook with a cheapo ARM or low-end Intel SoC shouldn't be able to natively run a better optimized graphics program like Paint Tool Sai with CPU time/battery to spare.