this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Unless the pc is free, why the fuck would anyone use it?
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.
Enough capital can reshape even a somewhat free market into a non-free one - if we, the demand, have basically no other choice (except revolt, but we forgot/got that erased from our consciousness) we usually just try to survive.
The mythos about how things are getting better for each generation of humans is false.
I can imagine something similar to this concept would be great for enterprise environments. I imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client and connecting to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. Which I think is basically already a thing. But for a home PC, with that VM being run the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.
God. I can't believe it. I've lived long enough to see the return of the dumb terminal. FFS.
This isn't uncommon, even I have that option at work. None of this is new tech.
It's just a long existing tech now used to close down on freedom & paywall all the things.
You just described Citrix whole business model
Lots of MSPs have already been doing / selling this exact thing for years.
Given all the attempts at eroding tech freedom, this might end up being future computing, but the cloud is state-controlled.
Penny-pinching companies love to give the absolute bare minimum equipment to their employees
I'm not using it even if someone is paying me (unless someone hacks the firmware, but that's a different story)
After 20 years when your CPUs, RAMs, and at least SSDs don't work anymore, and the PC supply never came back - how are you going to show/trick the government that you are a patriot that uses & supports one of the three big USA private AIs?
At that point the government can suck the lead out of my dick