Have generally been skeptical of 'cloud desktop' but... I had a friend who got in to sales for a cloud desktop provider about 6-7 years ago. There was only one real strong use case and she sold to that niche. Some specific cad/modeling/rendering vertical had software they used, and it was a CPU bear. Running that 'remotely' in the cloud was much faster than anything they could have locally. Managing all the licensing and security/perms there was an added benefit, but she was also mostly selling to smaller firms that didn't have full time staff to handle that.
For the market she was in, at the time, there was a moderately clear win. I watched a pitch, and the speed diff was real. The productivity gains in many folks saving an hour or two in rendering time was easily worth the... I can't remember - $200/month/seat maybe? Outside of those types of use cases, the benefits were harder to justify. And... in 2020+... unsure if local desktop CPU caught up enough that the benefits were lower.
I worked in architectural CAD for a number of years (as a software engineer, not an architect), and this surprises me. Sure you needed a PC with a little bit of beef to work in it smoothly, but not unaffordably beefy. A not all that recent macbook was good enough for pretty much all of our customers. I left the company in 2019, and plenty of people were still working on a 2012 macbook on the latest version. My own dev machine was a 2015 macbook.
We did offer cloud rendering as a subscription service, but most people just did big renders overnight, and that was usually animations, not single-frame renders.
I'm curious which CAD software is such a bear that cloud desktop was worth it. Whether the particular industry was just that incredibly complex, or if the product was just slow and inefficient.
The details are hazy, and our paths don't cross any more, so I can't say for sure. Yes, overnights were still done in some cases, but they were able to do more 'in day' smaller renders (IIRC) that was making it worthwhile.
IIRC... she done some consulting work for a particular firm, and they were investigating cloud stuff. When they chose that vendor, she saw how much of an impact that was making, and contacted the cloud vendor and became a salesperson/evangelist.
You were on a MacBook. They were all in the Windows/MS world, so perhaps there was something about that software that just was 'better on windows in the cloud'. Again, sorry I can't remember too many more details. I do suspect times have changed some, so the ROI may not be there any longer (and maybe wasn't there at the time for many folks).
The mystery deepens. I mentioned my mac because it's an easier comparison to make, but we were cross platform and I also had a contemporary ThinkPad. In fact, I worked mostly on the ThinkPad because I preferred Visual Studio to XCode.
Most of our customers did stick to mac, though. A lot of architects fancy themselves designers and really buy into Apple's marketing towards creatives.
I'm considering cloud desktop at work right now for something similarish. We have a fat pile of data and want to let people use the data. If we give them VMs on the same network as the data (with super high bandwidth and CPU amd GPU), they can manipulate the data quickly.
For the market she was in, at the time, there was a moderately clear win. I watched a pitch, and the speed diff was real. The productivity gains in many folks saving an hour or two in rendering time was easily worth the... I can't remember - $200/month/seat maybe? Outside of those types of use cases, the benefits were harder to justify. And... in 2020+... unsure if local desktop CPU caught up enough that the benefits were lower.