Microsoft's New PC Looks Just Like a Mac Mini but Serves a Whole New Purpose
9 points by sumnole 16 hours ago | 24 comments
  • gscott 16 hours ago |
    A computer without a fan. Worked well for the Apple 3.
    • mkl 15 hours ago |
      There are lots of other fanless thin clients already, and they work fine. I have some that work fine as local machines too after I upgraded RAM and storage.
    • recursive 15 hours ago |
      And phones and tablets.
      • grahamj 15 hours ago |
        And MacBook Airs
    • dboreham 15 hours ago |
      This comment seemed odd so I went looking for the Apple III fan story. Then things got more strange: the Wikipedia article is full of talk about things melting because there's no fan. However, read all the supposed references and nothing appears about overheating or missing fans. Based on the references Apple III initially had reliability issues due to socketed devices (a known bad idea) and use of substandard PCB manufacturing processes. The fan thing made me scratch my head initially because 8-bit micros pretty much never had fans. Cooling only became an issue generally speaking in the 32-bit generation, some 10 years later.
  • binary_slinger 16 hours ago |
    Will Windows 365 support color managed workflows and chroma 4:4:4? Because RDP does not.
    • recursive 15 hours ago |
      The best I can tell is that stuff is related to photography. I think the purpose of this thing is for office work, so probably not.
  • dismalaf 16 hours ago |
    > especially in the light that end users shall not have the privileges to install local apps

    So it's a way to lock users into the MS cloud ecosystem even more than normal Windows... How nice.

    • pupppet 14 hours ago |
      I can think of no greater hell than being locked in Microsoft’s ecosystem.
      • gary_0 11 hours ago |
        I have no local account and I must scream.
  • MBCook 15 hours ago |
    Is it the thin client part of the cycle already? I though we were still living in the middle of thick client times.
    • balakk 15 hours ago |
      For those of us in "enterprise" work farms, thin clients never really left. Citrix and related technologies are still massively used within any enterprise that has offshore/outsourced IT and software dev teams. It is still the most cost-optimal way to provide IT environments to vendor/non-FTE resources, and this is not going away any time soon. These devices can be incredibly convenient, it takes away the multiple man-years of effort involved in rolling out remote-access solutions.
    • greyface- 15 hours ago |
      I'm looking forward to the part of the cycle where these are discontinued, have been hacked to run Linux, and are sold used on ebay for $5 each.
  • SoftTalker 15 hours ago |
    The 1990s called, they want their X terminals back.

    It sounds like basically the same thing: a screen, keyboard and mouse that displays windows for apps running on a remote server.

    • kjellsbells 15 hours ago |
      The 1970s called, they want their 3270 terminals back.

      It's worth remember what the P in PC stood for. Personal. A computer that was yours to do with as you wished. Not a machine that is yours only as long as you pay rent to IBM (then) or Microsoft (now). It would be a tragedy to lose the P.

  • AzzyHN 15 hours ago |
    $349 for a terrible thinclient
    • rcarmo 8 hours ago |
      I expect OEMs to come out with cheaper variants (and more modern port selections).
  • politelemon 15 hours ago |
    > its design, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apple Mac Mini.

    I followed the link and they look nothing alike, unless this is the first time the author is seeing a mini pc. Otherwise it looks like a, surprise, mini pc.

    • weikju 8 hours ago |
      > I followed the link and they look nothing alike,

      So the title worked and made you click.

      (Also, I agree with you, if anything it looks closer to the now "old" Mac Mini design... only very very superficially speaking of course)

  • grahamj 15 hours ago |
    Not the worst idea or design but it's too expensive for a thin client.
  • sebazzz 10 hours ago |
    Since this thing only has to connect to some Windows 365 instance in the cloud, the device itself has no need to run Windows. I bet it runs some locked down flavour of Linux instead, similar to SteamOS or LibreELEC.
    • rcarmo 8 hours ago |
      Nope. It runs a heavily restricted version of Windows.
      • cr125rider 2 hours ago |
        Microsoft is going to use their own kernel. That doesn’t look great if they don’t even trust it.
  • kkfx 9 hours ago |
    Another step toward modern dumb terminals, now "thin clients" of the mainframe, now "the cloud", where a handful of giants own anything and the others nothing, not even understanding this. A name? Ah, yes, 2030's Agenda or an old book I suggest to anyone The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, by Clinton Roosevelt also available in pdf https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/sciencegovernme00roo...

    I suggest https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and really starting to think about where we are going and where we could go. We could go in a distributed society, resilient like the Internet, spread like Usenet, desktop-computing and homelabs as the norms, where companies who needs more own a shed or more with some racks, p.v. and storage to ensure stable power, FTTH and emergency radio (4G/5G and LEO sat access) full of very dynamic SMEs or a set of large internment camps named smart cities full of inmates and no innovation nor dynamism till the obvious collapse.

    BTW that's NOT a political vision but a technical one, because the cloud model will end up there technically anyway.