Yawn. People complaining about this apparently don’t work in IT and don’t know that thin clients which connect to a variety of different VDI solutions are pretty common in lots of different businesses and government agencies.
Fucking terminals. These are NOT PCs, this are TERMINALS! 1!!
40 year loop back to Wyse
Wyse never went away. They’re owned by Dell and continue selling thin clients to this day. The only difference here is that dell isn’t using their branding on these machines for some reason.
Please don’t buy this.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
Obviously these are going to be used for corporate or organizational settings, as it what was then with the so-called Network Computer thin clients which Oracle tried promoting but flopped.
I wonder why they failed previously 🤔🤔
It’s like a Chromebook, but for Windows. Only it doesn’t run Windows. Please buy our garbage.
Going back to the dumb terminal days of the 60s & 70s
Well, when the AI market crashes they will have lots of unused datacenters… Guess they found an use for that after all.
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
We use onedrive at work… everything goes onto onedrive, and then daily we have people bitching that onedrive has deleted their files.
Yup. You’ll have to babysit Onedrive UI client like a toddler. I use rclone when I need guarantees the files were indeed uploaded.
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
Goodbye local Windows, you mean. Except I said goodbye two years ago and never looked back or missed it. Windows does nothing I need, and does it poorly.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure, but ultimately I don’t care all that much.
I’m still petty enough to hope this effort is a miserable failure
I hope this is effort is a miserable failure … because if it catches on, it could spell the end of desktop PCs in general as a consumer product.
Desktops will always exist, because you need the local processing power (and the cooling to support it) for certain professional workloads. But if everyday computing and even gaming becomes mostly done on thin clients fully dependent on internet servers, then desktops will become more and more of a niche, professional product. Which means they’ll become more expensive and harder to get. Replacement parts will become more expensive and harder to get. A desktop PC will be an expensive industrial machine, hard to justify the upfront price of for an average consumer. (Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
It may also slow the adoption of open-source software because these thin clients are likely to be locked down and not able to install any other software without putting up a fight, if it ends up being possible at all. And if most people get used to the paradigm of renting their computing power from the cloud, they’ll be resistant to change that and go back to locally run software on their local machine that they then have to buy because their old thin client hardware can barely run anything, even if you do manage to install other software on it. (Imagine how hard it will be to convince someone to install Linux instead of using Windows if the first step of installing Linux is that they have to replace all their hardware with much bigger and more expensive hardware…)
Desktops are just hardware. Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they’ll get pretty, too.
Desktops are just hardware.
Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they’re sideways are the other properties of that hardware:
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Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts
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General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them
What I’m worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they’d like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.
But…
Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they’ll get pretty, too.
No desktops means more server options that people use at home. It’s still motherboards, RAM, GPU, etc.
Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.
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If you think about it: It is very wasteful for all of us to have local computation power at home. So many wasted resources as most people use their PCs only the fraction of the time. Same can be said for cars and many other appliances.
Maybe the solution are shared cloud resources, but obviously not owned by those big corporations, but owned by the people on a local, regional, national level?
And it isn’t wasteful to be forced to replace perfectly good hardware and filling landfills with it because fucking companies want to own your data, your money and your life? People like you are the reason these assholes feel empowered to push this crap.
I’m really worried about this, I don’t think it’ll become a universal standard by all means but I can see Microslop forcing this onto people as a kinda next step from all the hardware limitation bs.
They would finally have total control over your OS.
They’ve been pushing the thin client for years and it’s never taken off. You and I wouldn’t be the target for this machine and neither would gamers or content creators. This is for business or grandparents.
Self-hosters will be all over these
Assuming they’re not ridiculously locked down, which they probably are.
Not sure why they would be. There are plenty of these on the market already with no issues accessing the bootloader or installing other OSs on them. Same goes for Microsoft Surface device, Chromebooks, etc.
Think of how Wyse thin clients are typically ridiculously locked down, these are basically a newer version of those.
“not power themselfs” ?
Microsoft will determine when the PC needs to be booted up as per your employer’s demands 😆
Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot, as a further mega deal with Microsoft.
…But honestly, I think “home” buyers who don’t really care about PC stuff, aka most people, would pick tablets over this.
Business’s will not adore this. Cloud PCs in M365 or Azure cost money, often as much per year as it would cost to just purchase a pc to begin with.
So do all the Microsoft subscriptions they already buy, yet they’re extremely popular anyway?
Google calls it a Chromebox.
And in the 80’s we called them X Terminals.
Is it like xorg, or why X?
Yes, they were running X11
