11–20 of 56 posts
The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.
The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.
> Windows-as-an-App Is Coming To do what ? Running on bare hardware is a challenge for Windows.
> To do what ? Is it not obvious? It's the same purpose as XCode Cloud and Ubuntu Pro and Office 365; force users to pay recurring fees for basic functionality. This is what service-ification of completely normal software looks like, our penance for not caring enough as consumers.
I don't like subscriptions for everything but don't act as though an OS, which must receive continuous updates -- continuous labor from the vendor -- in order to remain secure and thus be usable as an Internet appliance, which is its primary purpose today, is not already a subscription service even if it is not priced as one.
Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.
But people will be reminded (lots are already beginning to see) and the pendulum will swing back away from using someone else's server. Then after a couple decades, the pendulum will swing back again. Rinse and repeat.
For people who need Windows for some business requirement, this lets them use less Windows, and have a Mac or Chromebook as their hardware. The result: less Windows.
For people who don't currently use Windows, does a slower, internet-only Windows present a compelling product? Windows doesn't really sell itself (other than as a gaming platform, but we have Nvidia's streaming platform for that), it's a default but if you've not got a business need most people either already have Windows (because the PC was cheap or they play games) or they aren't going to go looking for Windows.
As Windows becomes more and more of a platform for ongoing revenue (read: ads, subscriptions), it's likely to become less attractive for that second group, and that first group will spend less time with it (and see fewer ads).
I get that on-demand cloud machines make sense for many businesses, but I'm not sure that aligns well with my (very naive) understanding of Microsoft's priorities here.
Everything going to "the Cloud" is just a backslide into the mainframe era, but with shinier graphics. I feel like the age of micros has ended, killed off by clueless users with flashy phones.
The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.
Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would compan…
It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
So fucking tired of subscriptions.