Fucking terminals. These are NOT PCs, this are TERMINALS! 1!!
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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40 year loop back to Wyse
Wyse never went away. They're owned by Dell and continue selling thin clients to this day. The only difference here is that dell isn't using their branding on these machines for some reason.
Please don’t buy this.
You will own nothing and you will be happy!
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.
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.
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.
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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What in the name is the flying spaghetti monster is Windows 365? An even less private version of windows that won't work is you don't have internet?
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.
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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.
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...)
Desktops are just hardware. Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they'll get pretty, too.
Desktops are just hardware.
Sure. But more important than what they look like or whether or not they're sideways are the other properties of that hardware:
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Upgradeable and repairable with widely available replacement parts
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General purpose and capable of running any software you put on them
What I'm worried about is the desktop being replaced by something that meets neither of those points, resulting in a far worse experience for any person who wants to customize, maintain, and fully control their own computer, especially if they'd like to do so without interference from a huge corporation.
But..
Pretty cases on your desk will just get traded in for slim sideways 19" racks on a stand. And then they'll get pretty, too.
No desktops means more server options that people use at home. It's still motherboards, RAM, GPU, etc.
Server options tend to be significantly more expensive, with fewer places to buy parts.
(Especially when a cheap thin client with a "cheap" monthly subscription can do essentially all the same things.)
Right now, one year of Microsoft 365 costs a full hundred dollars... and there is still a strong desktop market.
If you're right that the tech industry is willing to price consumers out of personal computers - and it looks like they are - I can only imagine what will happen to those subscription prices.
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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?
They are all such cunts!
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?
And when your Internet goes down, you can't even work locally.
Genius!
I'm sure CoPilot in the cloud already took that into account though and goes off on all sorts of tangents with the user disconnected.
What could possibly go wrong?
"Don't you guys have internet?"
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Ah yes, it's around the time for thin clients of this cycle.
It's funny because we switched from thin clients to fat clients some 30-40 years back.
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Buy all the ram, inflating prices. Sell thin clients and access to computing power/ram. What a scam.
You’ll own nothing and be happy.
It is a Thinnet client. They have been around for at least 26 years.
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.
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Remember when you used to host your own citrix? Pepperidge Farm remembers
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren't entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I'll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
Back in the late 80’s we were calling “diskless” computers “dickless” computers. It was a different time, but the message is still correct.
yeah Im so glad I finally went to linux for my personal computing. Really should have done it about a decade earlier.
Obviously these are going to be used for corporate or organizational settings, as it what was then with the so-called Network Computer thin clients which Oracle tried promoting but flopped.
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I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
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Yawn. People complaining about this apparently don't work in IT and don't know that thin clients which connect to a variety of different VDI solutions are pretty common in lots of different businesses and government agencies.
For work, this would be great.
For home, hell nah.
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