Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

With fibber internet increasingly becoming standard around the world and 5G it makes perfect sense people will use their computer as a terminal for a more powerful computer in the cloud than buying powerful computers

Free trials are paused, not the project.

m a i n f r a m e :)

/me can barely contain shock.

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month

Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used?

I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management easier? What justifies an annual cost that is close to the lifetime cost of a physical machine?

You still need a physical machine to access "the cloud", so don't you still have all the expensive problems related to managing a fleet of PCs, but now you have to do it x2?

Is data security so important that some companies are willing to pay 5x hardware costs and 2x maintenance costs for it?

I really don't get it. When I looked at the cost of using Azure for failover on a single server, the conclusion I came to is that it only made sense to run something short term while new hardware was shipped in. Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware?