I find it morbidly fascinating how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software" and "the backend DCs to support this have to be built everywhere to reduce latency" plus "we can't bill this in any way that is correlative to our costs, because it won't make any sense to buyers", yet "we'll price it at a level that cannot possibly make sense for anyone except the most niche buyers".
Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.
Just very unclear who any of these services are for.
Remember when Google did this and it failed because PC gamers dont want 1700 stores for games. They just want Steam or GOG.
These companies do not know their customer base and it costs them.
I do see these devices making way more sense for enterprise on the other hand, to the dismay of many. But for the average consumer maybe not. I assume they are going to recycle the same tech they are using to let you stream Xbox games.
If Windows wasnt so damned bloated this wouldnt cost them much. Every Windows laptop that was nearing its end of life became magically better and still in my house all 15 years later after I installed Linux. Wild.
Google failed with Stadia because no sane AAA company would want to risk App/Play Store terms. The offering maybe made sense for A companies, but Google's requirements were too much for them (their marketing certain wasn't there). Google ended up subsidizing a few AAA companies, and then it fell to typical Google kill-it-now cost cutting. Microsoft has existing relationships and won't have this problem.
The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.
> how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software"
The leadership doesn’t believe egress is expensive.
And neither do the customers believe it.
However the customers are okay paying the egress price. So it stays, regardless of what leadership or customers say.
3. Can I still use my Ai Pin for offline features?
Yes. After February 28, 2025, Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access.
> Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc.
If I remember correctly, battery level was practically the only "offline feature" of the pin. A device whose only working feature is to check its own battery level isn't much use.
To be fair it’s a notoriously difficult thing to plan for. It’s less about incompetence, and more about having a strong understanding of user requirements, and a streamlined way to allocate costs to each business area based on their needs. That’s really hard for any company or MSP to do.
Variable costs means you never want to over invest in unused cores and memory, which leads to over subscribing those cores and memory… that’s fine for normal working hours, except Monday mornings when everyone starts logging in at once.
You can’t really queue logins that in a way that doesn’t make users think they’re using an infuriatingly slow machine.
Hospitals are about to go for this product like fucking catnip. It's all they've ever wanted for the fleet of 10k dumb client devices that all run Epic and nothing else.
I remember my first internship for a Boeing subcontractor in 2010ish went all-in on thin clients for like half the company of 200 employees or so. But with an on-prem Windows Terminal Server as the backend for RDP.
It was mostly fine-ish except for some annoyances like streaming audio being fairly sketchy for the era which bothered the techs who normally spent like ten hours a day listening to Pandora on headphones while making repairs.
Ended up having to block it to maintain decent performance for everyone because it bogged down the 100 Mbit LAN which resulted in a lot of grumbling and unhappy people. I imagine it's more viable these days.
The clients themselves were pretty cool though: cheap, booted almost instantly and ran cold. Until that job I had no idea how efficient RDP was as providing a near realtime experience even when bandwidth constrained.
At my current job there are a couple VMs I can only use via RDP and I honestly forget I'm even using it most of the time until the occasional random glitch reminds me.
This is for corporations too incompetent or too lazy to deploy Citrix infra, so they'd rather rent it from Microsoft As A Service. VDI can be very expensive so this could be win-win.
No one reads articles, they just ask questions based on the headline
In the first paragraph
> In 2024, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Link, a thin client for accessing the service, and today, the company is expanding the lineup with two more devices from its partners.
what in hell is "Windows 365" ? Windows 11 ?Defunct Office 365 now Copilot ? Will this thing be renamed "Windows Copilot" eventually becoming even more confusing as M$ knows to do oh so well ?
I want this for two reasons - Solidworks - the non cloud version, doesn't run on my MacBook. I don't want to have two full sized computers.
Steam - again, too many games don't run on Macs.
I'd also go for a single click launch of a GPU powered virtual machine I can remote onto from my Mac. You'd think the various cloud providers would offer a single click solution. I haven't found it.
Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.
Just very unclear who any of these services are for.
These companies do not know their customer base and it costs them.
I do see these devices making way more sense for enterprise on the other hand, to the dismay of many. But for the average consumer maybe not. I assume they are going to recycle the same tech they are using to let you stream Xbox games.
If Windows wasnt so damned bloated this wouldnt cost them much. Every Windows laptop that was nearing its end of life became magically better and still in my house all 15 years later after I installed Linux. Wild.
I think people just didn't want Google.
The leadership doesn’t believe egress is expensive.
And neither do the customers believe it.
However the customers are okay paying the egress price. So it stays, regardless of what leadership or customers say.
If I remember correctly, battery level was practically the only "offline feature" of the pin. A device whose only working feature is to check its own battery level isn't much use.
Variable costs means you never want to over invest in unused cores and memory, which leads to over subscribing those cores and memory… that’s fine for normal working hours, except Monday mornings when everyone starts logging in at once.
You can’t really queue logins that in a way that doesn’t make users think they’re using an infuriatingly slow machine.
Is this thin-pc terminals?
It was mostly fine-ish except for some annoyances like streaming audio being fairly sketchy for the era which bothered the techs who normally spent like ten hours a day listening to Pandora on headphones while making repairs.
Ended up having to block it to maintain decent performance for everyone because it bogged down the 100 Mbit LAN which resulted in a lot of grumbling and unhappy people. I imagine it's more viable these days.
The clients themselves were pretty cool though: cheap, booted almost instantly and ran cold. Until that job I had no idea how efficient RDP was as providing a near realtime experience even when bandwidth constrained.
At my current job there are a couple VMs I can only use via RDP and I honestly forget I'm even using it most of the time until the occasional random glitch reminds me.
In the first paragraph
> In 2024, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Link, a thin client for accessing the service, and today, the company is expanding the lineup with two more devices from its partners.
I'd also go for a single click launch of a GPU powered virtual machine I can remote onto from my Mac. You'd think the various cloud providers would offer a single click solution. I haven't found it.
Apple still quietly designing all their products on Windows these days? Not that there's anything wrong with that...