Technology

"Don't you guys have internet?"

You’ll own nothing and be happy.

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

I hope that future happens, but I'm scared.

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"

Not the Dell one, not worth your time or money - only has Intel N-series processor. But the ASUS one may have better internals.

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...)

Goodbye local Windows with Linux having a 3% market share means entirely different market & society too, regardless of our Linux desktops that can't get new parts.

Assuming the bootloader is not super locked down or even nonexistent, think Wyse thin client levels of locked down.

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.

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

Probably at least as powerful as a raspberry pi

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.

Given all the attempts at eroding tech freedom, this might end up being future computing, but the cloud is state-controlled.

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.

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)

Maybe we’re mature enough to have standalone computers…

Once we find a way to make them without child labour, sure.