This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.

Still overkill but not remotely impractical. Sending a "whole computer" would be no more difficult than shipping tiny PCs to Ebay buyers who often buy several at once for our "home lab" style setups.

A typical tiny PC plus power brick and its cord easily fits in a flat rate box (though for Important Stuff best sent next day air).

Before buying a top or donor Thinkpad I check to see if a better panel donor is available. I've built many Thinkpads from wrecks because it's generally so easy. I don't care about warranty service because I don't own a corporate fleet and keep my machines long past warranty expiration and EOS.

The HMM are free downloads from Lenovo making it even easier to work on Thinkpads. Their community is large, dedicated and helpful. I rarely damage mine but if I do I've plenty of spares, and thanks to easy drive removal (I never buy notebooks with soldered storage or RAM) I can toss the drive into another Thinkpad then sort out the first at leisure.

Those advantages are why the Thinkpad community like them. Of course some models suck but not buying those is effortless.

Always post the MODEL and SPECS because as with any make that matters greatly.

Wise notebook buyers study specific models under consideration. Wiser buyers do not buy new notebooks and let the rich beta test.
The classic way to buy Thinkpads is choosing used, proven models the Thinkpad community knows well.

I rarely buy new notebooks (and even then only established models) because I get far better bang for buck letting someone else take the hit then buying opportunistically.

So...Microsoft certainly didn't get the massive market share AOL had in the 90's, and they weren't too successful at getting the "walled garden" they were probably hoping for around that time...but they did just fine. Azure isn't *quite* AWS, but they're doing better than Google in IaaS revenue, and they spent most of the 00's and 2010's running the business world with desktop Windows and Windows Server - alongside Linux and not at super massive scale, granted, but they did just fine.

Where I think Apple's opportunity comes in is to replay the iPod playbook. There were a bunch of MP3 players before the iPod, and most of them had trouble once Napster fell. Apple ran the 2000's on the iPod not just because of the hardware, but because of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, making it possible to use both existing MP3 libraries and to create new ones, easily, legally, and virus-free.

I think that playbook can work here as well. I've got two computers with GPUs, one an RTX3060 and one an AMD 9060XT. Not flagships by any means, but enough to run local models well-enough. My Macbook issued to me by work has an M5 CPU, and it generates tokens within 20% as quickly as those cards, on battery. If Apple can conjure up some sort of AI App Store that serves up AI models and purpose-built apps for them, that run on Apple hardware with no subscription tied to them, and make the process smooth, seamless, and generally-useful, Apple can probably stand on OpenAI's shoulders and make a local AI laptop that's worth owning...and if they can do that, they can profit at the endpoint level without having to invest billions at the datacenter level like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing.

The Vision Pro, I think, would work well if they sold it as a business tool - diagram overlays, status windows, that sort of thing...but fashion accessories that obscure the face are VERY difficult to make work; people wear contact lenses because they prefer those to face-obscuring glasses that correct their vision. As a video game console or a work utility that's put on for a function and then turned off, there's a niche, but it's not going to be the sort of thing people just walk around wearing.

The story has nothing to do with technology or even science fiction.