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Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS (www.notebookcheck.net)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 32 points 7 months ago (15 children)

They've been pushing the thin client for years and it's never taken off. You and I wouldn't be the target for this machine and neither would gamers or content creators. This is for business or grandparents.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    It’s never taken off because of relatively inexpensive and abundant hardware. But these will be attractive to people who need something now and want something inexpensive.

    Grandparents are the immediate target but eventually if they force the hardware supply shortages soon some people will need something.

    Imagine students with low budget.

    The next 5 years are going to be really interesting.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    It must be noted that Big Tech is currently engaged in artificially forcing hardware prices upward, and that's going on while Microsoft continues their generations-long quest to deprecate old hardware by forcing new versions of their OS out of compatibility with it.

    There are so many ways they're actively screwing their customers by making things tangibly worse, and then conveniently showing up to "help" by selling us more of their shit.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Plus laws going after alternative OSes, no doubt lobbied for by MS to eliminate competition for Windows, are starting to creep in now, see Cali and Colorado.

    Next step will be mandating SecureBoot and limiting OS selection to a short list of approved options.

    And the end game will be thin clients connected to the cloud.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Grandparents don't want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Fair. But what if they completely eliminate the ability to buy hardware? like only selling to the AI fucks? Do grandparents not get phone plans for example?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    In general, we try to avoid recurring payments, whether debt, rent, or what have you. When we can't, we can't. But we'll buy used, we'll do whatever we can to avoid this shit — generally. So in my opinion which is undoubtedly a bit self-serving and should be taken with a grain of salt, grandparents aren't going to just roll over and accept computer as a service. The market for own your own computer will always be there, and so someone will sell it.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    They need to lower the price of the hosted desktops then, it's still way more cost effective over time to buy a laptop/desktop for a 3 years cycle than to rent a monthly virtual desktop. The only business that wants it are opex obsessives that hate any capex.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    gamers or content creators

    I can totally see them targeting those demographics as well, cloud gaming has been kinda popular in the last few years. Content creators could be sucked in with promises of getting pro performance without the price, possibly bundled with creative software.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Self-hosters will be all over these

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

    Assuming they're not ridiculously locked down, which they probably are.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Not sure why they would be. There are plenty of these on the market already with no issues accessing the bootloader or installing other OSs on them. Same goes for Microsoft Surface device, Chromebooks, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Think of how Wyse thin clients are typically ridiculously locked down, these are basically a newer version of those.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I never had a problem installing Debian on those Wyze boxes back in the day.

    I have a couple Minisforum boxes at work with Linux on them running some metric monitors. And I have a Beelink s12 pro that does an absolutely beastly job at being my Jellyfin server.

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