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...)

It's funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.

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.

"Don't you guys have internet?"

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.

You can be sure that planned obsolescence can be done much easier on these kind of hardware. One tweak from the backend and "oops, looks like Microslop 365 OS can't run your thin client"

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.

The OS is fully running on the cloud. You will be given a VM. Everything stays there. You may have to take permission to download a file from the VM onto your local device. You don't get any choice about telemetry.

Because an 8GB RAM stick costs $9,000 and hard drives literally can't be had at any price, but this shitty thin client thing is only $49.95 + $10/month subscription. ($25 per month if you want it with no fewer intrusive ads.)

Coming soon, to a dystopian AI future near you.

Something similar to this concept is great for enterprise environments. Imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client that just connects to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. That is already a widespread concept. But for a home PC, with that VM being run on the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.

These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.

You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don't get to install a custom OS, unless you're lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don't get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.

We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.

Walk into any office or business that runs off the cloud or a local server and they will likely have dozens.. I mean dozens of these lying around.

I know the gaming community looks at these like a vampire looks at a rosary but it isn’t new tech or even a new concept.

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?

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.