Centralized systems are a failure point. Ask the Visagoths how well it worked.

Lets not pretend the "strategy" goes beyond making as much money as possible.

You can host a small LLM model with a phone, or a whisper or a TTS, maybe some light diffusion.

You cannot do tool use, reasonable coding, get non-hallucination answers on even moderate questions. That stuff starts to get viable around 24G and really needs closer to 200G to be able to do most of that they're doing.

the reason they bought up all the ram is to keep someone from buying 200G of vram and diying cards putting them out of business.

I agree on a cultural level; but this feels like a choice? An older PC isn't that far away from phones on price. We're not so far from folks moving to services at home, tech barriers have dropped considerably, prices are likely to do the same, and big tech just keeps giving people good reasons to do so.