I’m really worried about this, I don’t think it’ll become a universal standard by all means but I can see Microslop forcing this onto people as a kinda next step from all the hardware limitation bs.
They would finally have total control over your OS.
Especially for businesses. At work you’ll have no choice but to use something like this.
This is horrifying in that it signals a concerted push towards getting consumers on cloud computing.
But in terms of self hosting your own compute these actually look great, especially if they’re subsidized to get you into a subscription fee. As long as we can break into the bootloader and run Linux on these, they look to be very capable and efficient small compute boxes. 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, DDR5 memory, and Intel N series processors?
Self hosters and homelabbers will be licking their lips.
These fuckers themselves have increased the price of PC components and now they have the gall to release this cloud-only PC to “alleviate the problem of the current market scenario”.
I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?
I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?
Yes. Very probably.
Of course, no security mechanism lasts indefinitely in the hands of a persistent hacker with physical access.
I’m so sick of Microsoft I actually installed Fedora KDE Plasma.
Genuinely, it’s nicer than windows lol
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying, but overall it works really well, has more features and looks slick.
Ain’t ever going back.
The occasional forum crawling is a bit annoying
I was on windows since 3.1, dual booted various distros of Linux the past 15 years, and removed windows from my computers over a year ago.
I would have to crawl forums to find fixes for stupid shit in windows once in awhile, less than Linux 15 years ago, but more than Linux in the lead up to getting rid of it. The thing that really pissed me off was the most egregious issues with win10/11 that id be looking for solutions to would always be changed back on the next update.
Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot, as a further mega deal with Microsoft.
…But honestly, I think “home” buyers who don’t really care about PC stuff, aka most people, would pick tablets over this.
Business’s will not adore this. Cloud PCs in M365 or Azure cost money, often as much per year as it would cost to just purchase a pc to begin with.
So do all the Microsoft subscriptions they already buy, yet they’re extremely popular anyway?
I see this going nowhere
For a few hundred bucks I have a mini PC with which I can do anything I want
This thing, even at half price, would only allow office365, with monthly payments.
Who the fuck would want that and not just spend a few bucks more and have an actual computer?
you are missing the point that no one wants 365 since we have liberoffice, onlyoffice etc
Well, when the AI market crashes they will have lots of unused datacenters… Guess they found an use for that after all.
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.
Ah yes, it’s around the time for thin clients of this cycle.
Buy all the ram, inflating prices. Sell thin clients and access to computing power/ram. What a scam.
Fuck you MS
Yes, terrible disease.
I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
We use onedrive at work… everything goes onto onedrive, and then daily we have people bitching that onedrive has deleted their files.
Google calls it a Chromebox.
And in the 80’s we called them X Terminals.
Is it like xorg, or why X?
Yes, they were running X11
Back in 2008-2009 I shared this crazy idea with my peers that Microsoft was moving towards an “always connected” OS that would probably be hosted on their servers, because you can make more money charging someone for access to their data than charging them once for their OS.
they laughed it off and told me that nobody would fall for that.
…who’s laughing now assholes?
It was never crazy and people were predicting this since the 90s. It’s essentially a return to the dumb terminal & mainframe paradigm that was in use prior to desktop pcs.
So a thin client?
Yes. You run windows remotely, probably through that 2.5G ethernet.
I’d rather be struck by lightning than use cloud computing through Wi-Fi.
Sorry I meant that along the lines of “this is already a thing just marketed differently.” Hyping up something that already exists as something new just feels odd and forced. Like if I made a car but called them “vroom vrooms” and marketed them for driving down Young street only.
My guess for the only difference is that it’s locked to Azure
If the pc has specs to run something from the cloud it has specs to run a local os.
Depends on what you do and depends on how it’s set up.
At a previous job we had thin clients set up to connect to some remote desktops, and indeed they were running an OS locally, but had barely enough resources to run the OS and the client app.
Maybe uould find a version of linux that would run on them. I’m not a linux aficionado but I’ve found cut-down flavours useful in the past when I’ve needed something that could run on a crippled potato.
Again, depends on what your use case is. Even if you find a stripped down OS that’s less resource heavy, you’ll probably still be using the same other software (i.e. same browser on the same modern web, and you’ll be out of RAM once you open 10-20 tabs). If a manufacturer has meant this as base specs for a thin client, you’re not tricking anyone (but yourself) by trying to use it as a full featured computer, and you’re still driving sales (at least on the hardware part) on a deliberately crippled product.
If you want to vote with your wallet (as IMO everyone should), you don’t buy this and repurpose it; you simply don’t buy it.
