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.

If this and everything else happening right now is the eventuality, then 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)

lol. Nope.

Something similar to this concept is great for enterprise environments. Imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client that just connects to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. That is already a widespread concept. But for a home PC, with that VM being run on the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.

Penny-pinching companies love to give the absolute bare minimum equipment to their employees

You just described Citrix whole business model

Someone 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.

I look forward to thrifting one in a few years, then installing Linux on it.

Probably at least as powerful as a raspberry pi

These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.

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"

Lots 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.

Ah yes, it's around the time for thin clients of this cycle.

Not the Dell one, not worth your time or money - only has Intel N-series processor. But the ASUS one may have better internals.

Assuming the bootloader is not super locked down or even nonexistent, think Wyse thin client levels of locked down.

....good

Given all the attempts at eroding tech freedom, this might end up being future computing, but the cloud is state-controlled.

It's funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.

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...)

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.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

Maybe we’re mature enough to have standalone computers…

Once we find a way to make them without child labour, sure.

And when your Internet goes down, you can't even work locally.

Genius!

I'm sure CoPilot in the cloud already took that into account though and goes off on all sorts of tangents with the user disconnected.

What could possibly go wrong?

You’ll own nothing and be happy.

yes but how often does your internet go down? I agree with the sentiment and I hate this but we should think about this from an average user perspective when we make our argument. Internet doesnt go down, I've had more electricity outages than internet outages in the past 5 years. if you live in a city its a rare thing.

The reason why people shouldnt want this in my opinion is not because its day to day worse but because its worse long term. These companies will offer it at a low price to entice you then yank the rug out from under you. You will never be safe with an option like this because at any time it can be taken from you and one day there might not be an alternative market of computers to purchase.

Congratulations. My home internet was down the whole day yesterday. My power goes out at least once or twice per month due to the current nature of the power line structure. I live in Europe.

The dodgy WiFi gear from my fiber provider requires a hard re-set at least once a week. I had to do that just today.

I hope that future happens, but I'm scared.

I'm sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

I live in (Eastern) Europe.

(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.

You 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 might have skipped that cycle. Local always.

"Don't you guys have internet?"

8 days ago when Cloudflare bunked up my ISP.

At that point the government can suck the lead out of my dick

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.

This product is aimed at people who live in places with reliable infra. (no offense intended)

I have no idea how you put up with that. I would not accept that from any ISP router. If my ISP router has any issue I can ship it back for free and receive a brand new one a few days later. There should also be options for bringing your own router.

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?

It is a Thinnet client. They have been around for at least 26 years.

Buy some 3D-printed kit to offline-overwrite a memory chip. We did this with consoles too back then, the pain just isn't big enough yet.

What in the name is the flying spaghetti monster is Windows 365? An even less private version of windows that won't work is you don't have internet?