>I can, however, imagine a day when even the computing power for video and graphics production (Audio, too?) is offloaded to a far off server, leaving behind just the tablet / keyboard interface as the computer client for the artist. That's because you don't understand the bandwidth required. A feature film at 2K is pretty much 10TB of data. Even offloading that sort of pipeline from your local machine to a machine down the hall invokes a SAN. If the gamers will no longer need high-end computing, then does it matter if the gamers are running on entry level hardware? And if you don't understand my world, how do you know it's "ridiculously overpriced?" Are there not economics of production there, too? Or are you turning opinions into facts in order to maintain your worldview?