The laptop refresh didn't happen

The three-year laptop refresh is on the CFO's desk: four hundred machines at roughly $1,500 each. IT asks for a different line.

Each employee's workstation becomes a container, cloned from a golden image with the office suite, the ERP client, the browser, the department's tools. The employee opens a display URL and gets a full desktop rendered in the browser. The six-year-old laptop on their desk is fast enough, because it's only drawing pixels. So is a $300 Chromebook. So is the tablet in the conference room.

Four hundred mostly-idle desktops fit on a few flat-rate servers; idle clones share disk blocks and the kernel caches the shared binaries once. The hardware budget moves from four hundred devices every three years to a handful of server rentals, renewed on a number the CFO already approved.

The refresh cycle ended because the workstation stopped being the thing on the desk.