I just don't see how that's different from getting more value by giving all your employees the most stripped-down chromebook-type devices and running everything else in the cloud, than by giving them "proper" laptops with local apps.

It's a measure of a very thin sort of "value/$" that excludes a lot of other things that could be of value to a business, like control, predictability, and availability.

Thin clients have been going away for a long time. The trend has been to continue to push higher levels of compute into ever-smaller and ever-more-portable devices.

I don't know that this is true. The cloud companies are making money, and inferrence is kind of just "hosting an inferrence server and trying to keep it humming 24/7"

But in many cases self hosted or dedicated boxes are cheaper than cloud.