I will however observe;
None of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home.
Today, there are certainly options for personal computing for most everything- as long as network effects are not in play.
Those options may not be as convenient, as cheap, or as feature-rich as the invasive option. That's fair though - you decide what you want to prioritize.
Network effects are harder to deal with. To the extent that in order to be in community you need to adopt the software the community has chosen.
Not surprisingly, software producers that can build-in network effects, do so. It's excellent from a lock-in point of view.
The title of the article is perhaps then ironic. It's trivial to make computing personal. All the tools to do so already exist.
The issue is not Personal Computing. It's Community Computing.
If you chose to use iAnything then it's a bit late to start complaining about lock in now.
The internet is where I get ideas and news (and some of the above content — magazines as PDF for example).
So I guess the "network effect" I keep to as much of a minimum as I reasonably can?
(EDIT: oh, I don't really use my phone except as a camera and road navigator. I would love to have a completely offline map app that was decent.)
That's what's wrong with the various "federated" social networks. They lack a network effect that makes them grow.
Most people's primary, if not only, computing device is their phone - which at the same time is probably the most restricted device.
And if you wanted to build your own and connect to the mobile network - it's considerably harder than doing the same for a traditional personal computer.
It's interesting there is a lot of agreement. In a way I'm surprised because I often get the impression a lot of people here have pretty well drunk the Kool-aid of corporatism.
In the past you could do almost anything on a personal computer, it was generally about as fast as mainframe or high end workstation.
Training large AI models is currently impossible for most home users. They just do not have the processing power.
There were of course "home computery" phenomenons with network effects: IRC and Usenet, for example. There are several reasons why they've fallen out of fashion, but corporations shepherding new users into silos is surely a big one. It's a classic tale of enthusiasts vs. the Powers That Be, although the iteration speed and overall impact is perhaps most noticeable in digital technology.
Perhaps we were naïve to think we'd be left alone with a good thing. I too hope for a comeback of "personal computing", but in every scenario conceivable to me, we end up roughly where we are now - unless also re-imagining society from first principles. And if we do that, the question is whether personal computing would have emerged at all.
Most people I know literally still to use the lowest common denominator of communications because corporates have managed to screw up interoperability in their land grabs to build walled gardens. The lowest common denominator in my area is emailing word documents or PDFs around. Same as we have been doing for the last 30 years. The network effect there was Word being the first thing on the market.
All other attempts have been entirely transient and are focused in either social matters or some attempt at file storage with collaboration bolted on the top. The latter, OneDrive being a particularly funny one, generally results in people having millions of little pockets of exactly what they were doing before with no collaboration or community at all.
If we do anything now it's just personal computing with extra and annoying steps.
And no, 99% of the planet doesn't use github. They just email shitty documents around all day. Then they go back home and stare at their transient worthless social community garbage faucet endlessly until their eyes fall shut.
No problem at all.