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.
Something similar to this concept is great for enterprise environments. Imagine an employee at home using a basic thin client that just connects to a "mainframe" of a server that exists on premises and is running an individual VM or whatever for each employee's thin client. That is already a widespread concept. But for a home PC, with that VM being run on the OS manufacturer's servers? No, I don't think anybody should want to pay for that.
You just described Citrix whole business model
God. I can't believe it. I've lived long enough to see the return of the dumb terminal. FFS.
Lots of MSPs have already been doing / selling this exact thing for years.
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.
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
Given all the attempts at eroding tech freedom, this might end up being future computing, but the cloud is state-controlled.
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.