I feel bad for the poor bastards that will certainly have these forced on them at the office or at school.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Apparently my job will be getting rid of our personal local network drives (we each have our own only we can connect to) and moving that to Microsoft one drive. Our IT guy hates the new changes, but the orders come from way above. Not sure how well it will work…
Don't worry, to make it work,he'll only need to open the firewall to the Internet for dozens of MS subdomains and thousands of IP's in ranges that can randomly change from day to day. Totally more an issue for systems which might have been segregated from the Internet before!
/s
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.
Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot, as a further mega deal with Microsoft.
...But honestly, I think "home" buyers who don't really care about PC stuff, aka most people, would pick tablets over this.
I used to work at a thrift store a decade ago, it was pretty common for people to drop off laptops (some of them pretty sick at the time), I'd ask why and the response was always "we have ipads". I doubt things have improved since then.
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?
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?
Google calls it a Chromebox.
And in the 80's we called them X Terminals.
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 did since it was online. It's closed and online, the OS "owner" are the only true admin. If it's closed and online, your "commands" are just "suggestions" compared to theirs.
Especially for businesses. At work you'll have no choice but to use something like this.
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.
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.
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.
Grandparents don't want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.
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.
I would be surprised if this WASN’T a conspiracy among all the billionaires in their secret clubs.
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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They are all such cunts!
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.
Am I interpreting this wrong, or do the specs look like absolute crap? I would expect a thin client would need hardware this good:
2 vCPU
4 GB RAM
64 GB Storage
It is a Thinnet client. They have been around for at least 26 years.
Remember when you used to host your own citrix? Pepperidge Farm remembers
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