xavier666Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS
MagicShelGoodbye 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.
DFX4509BI’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…)
(Especially when a cheap thin client with a “cheap” monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
Right now, one year of Microsoft 365 costs a full hundred dollars… and there is still a strong desktop market.
If you’re right that the tech industry is willing to price consumers out of personal computers - and it looks like they are - I can only imagine what will happen to those subscription prices.
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.
Relax my fellow human.
Neither did I imply that people should be forced to throw away their hardware, nor did I say that no one should own anything or completely surrender to any corporate overlords (actually I said the opposite).
All I meant is that sharing resources sometimes makes sense. When I see people buy very expensive and powerful machines for browsing the internet and regular office work all I can think is “what a waste”, blind consumerism. I think we can do better. What “better” is, I’m not certain either.
If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!
Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?
now that you say this, it is also so wasteful for all of us to leave our homes empty while we go to work! we need to destroy homeownership, and we need to require all landlords to host multiple families in their properties! It’s not only the empty space, the empty beds and toilet, but also the fridges that keep consuming power, even though nobody is actively using them!
Jeez you really hit a nerve here, with your pretty sane concept about sharing resources communally.
I guess some people really don’t like the word wasteful or something.
It’s quite interesting to see the reactions. I’m happy to call it “inefficient” instead? I’m not a native English speaker so maybe the choice of word indicated to some that I wanted to blame people, that was not my intention.
Maybe it’s the fact that many users here are very tech savvy and would never want to give away sovereignty of their devices, which I can fully relate to. But I believe this perspective totally skews what an average user needs in computational power for everyday tasks.
This “communal computing” solution is just an idea. Maybe it’s stupid and has many downsides I haven’t considered, but I think it’s quite apparent, that we’ll not be able to continue this way forever, especially if more and more people on this planet rightfully want access to all these amenities.
We feel very entitled to our technology, and I fully think it plays an important part in open society, having access to information etc.
But it’s simple ridiculous to believe that it’s some kind of basic human right for everyone to own one or many high end devices for stuff that could easily be done with a 5-10 year old device.
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.
Goodbye local Windows with Linux having a 3% market share means entirely different market & society too, regardless of our Linux desktops that can’t get new parts.
I’ll just point out that 3% market share is still bigger than the entire market when started building PCs. And that’s assuming they can make this attractive to anyone. Single point of failure for your entire company? Single supplier who has you over a barrel when they want to raise prices? Who in their right mind would go for that.
We’ll see. The fact that it’s on offer doesn’t mean people will bite. I’ve seen the industry try so much stupid shit that people said no to. Free computer full of ads? No. Scan cat? No. Packing LEDs into things that don’t need to light up or be hotter? Well… they got us there.
Yes, good points, but what can make financial sense doesn’t need to make economical sense.
Perhaps in such events we can transition to smaller, maybe RISK-V boards with components from various manufacturers.
ValmondI jumped ship like 2 years ago too, but kept a “windows game box” i5 8500 with an rx6400 to play.
The sff (usff?) thinkcentre 6500t with linux is so good it’s insane. Somewhere 6-9 months ago I just stopped booting the win-box.
One day I’ll probably switch os on it and use the better PC as my daily driver, but my quad core is enough for now, crazy actually when I think of the sluggishness of windows on a “+50%” (or more) pc…
Humans aren’t mature enough to have an internet. It was a mistake; can we take it back??? Maybe we’re mature enough to have standalone computers… maybe.
Unless the pc is free, why the fuck would anyone use it?
I’m not using it even if someone is paying me (unless someone hacks the firmware, but that’s a different story)
After 20 years when your CPUs, RAMs, and at least SSDs don’t work anymore, and the PC supply never came back - how are you going to show/trick the government that you are a patriot that uses & supports one of the three big USA private AIs?
At that point the government can suck the lead out of my dick
Victoria
SatyrSackI can imagine something similar to this concept would be great for enterprise environments. I imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client and connecting to a “mainframe” of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee’s thin client. Which I think is basically already a thing. But for a home PC, with that VM being run the OS manufacturer’s servers? No, I don’t think anybody should want to pay for that.
You just described Citrix whole business model
RomkslrquszLots of MSPs have already been doing / selling this exact thing for years.
God. I can’t believe it. I’ve lived long enough to see the return of the dumb terminal. FFS.
This isn’t uncommon, even I have that option at work. None of this is new tech.
It’s just a long existing tech now used to close down on freedom & paywall all the things.
Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can’t be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)
Enough capital can reshape even a somewhat free market into a non-free one - if we, the demand, have basically no other choice (except revolt, but we forgot/got that erased from our consciousness) we usually just try to survive.
The mythos about how things are getting better for each generation of humans is false.
lol. Nope.
terrificSomeone will install Linux on them and use them as a cheap barebones computer. I’m sure with a bit of jiggery-pokery they can be repurposed to something useful.
Probably at least as powerful as a raspberry pi
Far more, in fact.
Snot FlickermanThese definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.
mycodesucksYou say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don’t get to install a custom OS, unless you’re lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don’t get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.
We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.
I don’t know, I don’t share your pessimism. In my personal experience, most hardware isn’t unhackable. Apart from iPhone / iPad (where hardware and software are non-standard, and also made by the same vendor) I struggle to find any examples.
I have installed Linux many times on Chromebooks, where there is some BIOS module that checks for OS “authenticity”, but that can be disabled. I have flashed ROMs on android devices many times too. It’s sometimes a bit inconvenient, but nothing remotely close to impossible.
That BIOS feature can be disabled… now. But there’s nothing keeping a manufacturer from just not providing that functionality, and requiring only signed firmware updates. Now the machine is more or less locked down.
The fact it can be disabled now is a convenience feature based on historical availability, but that’s absolutely no guarantee it will continue to be there in the future.
Buy some 3D-printed kit to offline-overwrite a memory chip. We did this with consoles too, the pain just isn’t big enough yet.
artyomUpvoted for jiggery-pokery
actionjboneI look forward to thrifting one in a few years, then installing Linux on it.
You can be sure that planned obsolescence can be done much easier on these kind of hardware. One tweak from the backend and “oops, looks like Microslop 365 OS can’t run your thin client”
kurmudgeonNot the Dell one, not worth your time or money - only has Intel N-series processor. But the ASUS one may have better internals.
It’s also not worth my time or money to track down old, beat-up Chromebooks and put Linux on them, and yet here we are.
I’m weird, so the things I find fun are weird.
I hope that future happens, but I’m scared.
It’s funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.
Dave.I’m sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔
Not if you’re an enterprise. I worked at a company where 80% of our workers (so over 2000) were on thin clients, even remotely. We could manage and upgrade the entire fleet easily from a single point. Ran the servers in house but were able to switch a portion to the cloud if we needed. We were doing that 20+ years ago.