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Comment by Flenser | Hacker News Reader

You're conflating two different things: Local Storage/caching, and the medium it is stored on, spinning disks.

The data may live in the cloud, but it will be heavily cached locally. We'll still need several GB or TB of local storage, be it spinning disks, SSDs or permanent RAM.

Grandparents won't want to be without the home video of their grandchildren just because their WiFi router stopped working or their ISP is having problems. And it will be a long time before mobile coverage reaches everywhere you might take your computer: communications black spots, rural areas, Planes, Tunnels etc.

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  We'll still need several GB or TB of local storage, be 
  it spinning disks, SSDs or permanent RAM.

Yes I should have clarified -- I expect memristors to be on the market within a few years. Once they're ready I bet we'll see all laptops and mobile devices move over to them. Between memristor based local storage/cache, and large/cheap cloud storage, I don't see much reason for having hard disks, software, and data in our local computers for very long. Just keep all your data and apps on the cloud, and use web-based apps for accessing them. The foundation for this type of computing world is absolutely being built right now by thousands of companies. It's definitely coming.

Between memristor based local storage/cache, ... I don't see much reason for having hard disks, software, and data in our local computers for very long.

These apps will still be stored (permanently cached as a web-app) and running on the local box and able to run in an offline mode. We won't be installing pre-packaged software that we have to upgrade manually, but we'll still need a powerful machine to run them; not a thin client.

The mechanisms whereby the software gets on our machines may change, but it's still going to be on our machines.

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