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.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
Please don’t buy this.
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 🤔🤔
I don’t know Oracle’s product but the company I work for has had a ton of people working on VDI for like 15 years now. It’s a solved problem. The only real annoying part was that it required pretty solid bandwidth and people would try using it on shitty Internet and then expect us to fix it. I’m kind of surprised it took this long for a consumer version to get off the ground. I would never use it because it sounds like a privacy nightmare but most people don’t think about that shit.
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
Asus and Dell announce their own Mac Minis but this time with blackjack and hookers.
Laughs in Debian
The Live USB disk laughing maniacally at the PC
“not power themselfs” ?
Microsoft will determine when the PC needs to be booted up as per your employer’s demands 😆
It’s a really stupid way to describe thin clients, anyway. Assuming that’s what this is. I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.
I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.
I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.
Not more than 1Gbpa
For work, this would be great.
For home, hell nah.
That’s crazy
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.
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 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…
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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(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.
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 illegalize 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!
Well yeah it is, but is most likely much harder to solve co-living like that in a way that’s acceptable for almost any people. Whereas what was suggested here is that people pool their resources and lend/rent to each other.
Nothing about forcing anything on anyone, and people who want to be able to have exactly the CPU they need at any given time would probably not be interested.
Network down, can’t use Computer. Government Shit, can’t use computer. Cloud Computing companies shit? Can’t use computer. I want to be able to use it whenever wherever without trusting the whole Chain to hold.
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?
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.
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.
But yes, I too keep hoping consumers would speak up & stop bs practices. Then again, if we kill a consumer industry you can’t just bring it back in a year, and megacorps can weather in the meantime by offering consumers short-term incentives if they make the switch. It’s how all the personal data collection by private corps started, why eg Google had free services (and no ads) & yet was already being valued in the billions.
Free computer full of ads? No.
people are paying for that nowadays. they call them smartphones. even the operating system and base apps show ads.
Assuming the bootloader is not super locked down or even nonexistent, think Wyse thin client levels of locked down.
Ah yes, it’s around the time for thin clients of this cycle.
It’s funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.
I’m sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔
I might have skipped that cycle. Local always.
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.
If you skipped the cycle of VDI, consider yourself lucky lol
They offer VDI at my workplace but they are so locked down that it’s completely useless for any real work. But I know that some departments do use them. Fuck 'em.
About 15 years ago we started transitioning from on-site computing to cloud. Now we’re reversing the trend under the guise of “edge computing”.
Except at the company I work for. We switched from thin clients to laptops (which are used as thin clients) last year.
You’ll own nothing and be happy.
Buy all the ram, inflating prices. Sell thin clients and access to computing power/ram. What a scam.
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?
“Don’t you guys have internet?”
Considering this is very clearly targeted enterprise, there’s probably some sector of a company that works on data that’s only in the cloud anyways. They’re likely the ones asking for this. I highly doubt this would become a norm across the enterprise.
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.
Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
I live in (Eastern) Europe.
This product is aimed at people who live in places with reliable infra. (no offense intended)
Name a single country with no power outages
You do realise power outages affect regular PC users and cloud PC users all the same.
And yet, most consumers use laptops with build in batteries. A power outage doesn’t stop them dead most of the time. It will for Windows 365 users. You’re doing an awful lot of sugar coating for someone that claims to be against this product.
I can’t work on a laptop. Might as well just use a shitty tablet instead. I’ll use a desktop PC, thank you very much.
Also, in the last 20 years I have experienced 2 power outages. One took about 3 hours to fix, which was spooky but also very cool, the other was in January this year and lasted for about 30 minutes. It’s really not a problem.
If thats happening you got bigger problems
It’s especially in those situations (like with climate warming, increasing political unrest and top-down control) that you want a working system. And also that connectivity is one of the first things to go down.
You realise that windows already does this and you can still work without internet. The way the sign in tokens works does not require 100% internet connection.
I hate the idea of a cloud OS but I also dont care about society collapsing as an argument.
8 days ago when Cloudflare bunked up my ISP.
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 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.
Fiber gear is a little different and I’d rather deal with this than the bullshit data caps and price hike games with Comcast. 😉
I have fiber, can’t even remember the last time my internet went down. It’s not a fiber thing, it sounds like a shitty hardware thing.
It’s definitely a shitty hardware thing.
yes but how often does your internet go down?
I have a 1Gb connection. I work in software development. I live in a nice neighbourhood. My internet goes down all the time.
I live in a major city that’s been carved up by the local monopolists like a turkey, and none of them have even installed coverage in all the areas they’ve claimed and which their “competitors” won’t touch. Some people just can’t have a good connection because of their address.
Im sorry to hear that. Maybe this is a product aimed at 1st world countries. Expected downtime for 1st world countries is normally under an hour a year and I think people can live with that.
If your internet is shit you do not need to buy this.
I do live in a 1st world country. I enjoy socialized (free) health care. And actually my country has some of the best internet in the developed world.
Maybe this is a product aimed at 1st world countries.
I guess that rules out the USA.
Expected downtime for 1st world countries is normally under an hour a year
Citation needed.
If your internet is shit you do not need to buy this.
Nobody should buy this.
If your internet is going down all the time it’s definitely not “some of the best in the world”.
My specific issue is a buried line at some point between my house and the next ISP demark. I did say “all the time”, but that was hyperbolic. It only goes down when it rains or when snow is melting, which suggests a cable somewhere is cracked and water gets in and degrades the signal.
It happens maybe once a week in the spring, and is back as soon as I reboot the router.
But your assertion that just because a single person’s internet goes down that the entire country’s internet is not “the best” is childish and a reductionist argument.
yes but how often does your internet go down?
About once a month. Not for very long, but it is an annoyance. Xfinity usually does maintenance between 1am and 2am, and the Internet will be out for about 30 minutes to an hour. About once a year it goes down for at least half a day.
My OS hasn’t gone down at all in 20 years. I don’t want that to change. If an OS stops working for an hour once a month for maintenance, it’s a piece of refried shit.
“Now updating, please wait!”
I mean, technically not “down” but not exactly usable either. 😉
im sorry your ISP is dogshit. I dont think anyone in your area will want to buy this product.
That’s the problem. Comcast is famous in the US for being utter dogshit. So is ATT. And that’s pretty much our choices.
What happens if the local ISP/electrical/whatever decides there need for maintenance?
Not every company can afford redundant high speed internet.Ok your internet goes down for a few hours and life moves on. Its not the end of the world.
Didnt know a company that relies on the internet can just move on lmao.
That could some cost their job. But hey, just move on (งツ)วThey have no choice but to move on. The aws outage took most things offline and everyone moved on. Half the people in this thread say their internet goes down weekly. 99.99999% uptime is a meme that very few companies actually require.
I think your opening statement is getting you down votes.
This tech isn’t aimed at consumers, it is for business users where the business has decided to deploy remote windows servers for their employees.
I wouldn’t want one of these as a daily home pc.
I understand and expect down votes. I am on the same wavelength as most people here. I am just trying to offer some commentary that isnt the same 100x repeated X bad perspective.
I actually asked for something exactly like this at my work a few years ago. I was like why the fuck are we buying 1000 machines when we can run all these desks as VMs off our servers. We didnt end up doing it but I still think its a decent idea for business.
For consumers its a very good value proposition but a horrible trap.
