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I think the future and technology in general is steered by the companies. Apple is obviously pushing for computing power residing in the pocket (and on the desk) because that’s where they get their money. They don’t sell anything for the cloud.
I believe they are probably the only company that is still pushing for this model. Apple is extremely successful and powerful. I’d say that if they aren’t the leading company, they are certainly one of the leaders. If it weren’t for this I’d say that the future is guaranteed to be cloud because it looks like everyone else is headed towards the cloud.
Personally, I prefer to have control over my own data. I don’t like that any of it is stored in a cloud that I don’t control. So you can obviously imagine that I don’t really use cloud services and I like Apple’s model. I may not even like how Apple is doing it, but I still prefer the control.
That said, I believe the changes that have matured because of the cloud, mainly containerization, will eventually push their way into desktops and even phones. You can see this happening in the desktop with things like Silverblue Fedora. RancherOS is also an example of a containerized operating system. Containerization solves so many problems.
I think companies that don’t adapt to this new way of doing operating systems are going to lose ground to companies that do. This could undermine some of Apple’s lead. And some of the other hard to discern smoke signals coming from Cupertino could turn out mean that Apple has some serious operating system problems that could undermine its lead completely.