michaelmrose@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The very idea of simply owning a screen, keyboard, and mouse, and using Windows remotely via a subscription will likely send shivers down many of your spines — but you have to consider the trends here.
You need at minimum an ethernet or wifi adapter and a processor and a GPU to decode video and push pixels to the screen. You need effectively a local PC to rent a remote PC
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
Phones? Tablets? There’s your local PC right there.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Why a phone connected to the cloud PC is shit
This would be an amazingly trash experience over wireless so you would need to dock both because wifi sucks in most people’s house AND because it would just constantly die.
Then it would ruin the battery to run it this way and on most user devices this is difficult/expensive to replace.
Many people have old phones that would perform even more poorly than average.
Your phone needs to be in your pocket and used for a million and one things not on the desk running a client to the cloud where you are editing an office document .
Oh sorry can’t listen to my music as I walk around the house because I have to fuckin undock it.
No honey you can’t use the PC its actually my phone and I’m running out the door. Let’s undock it and fuck about and make your phone the client oh wait it doesn’t work with your model for some reason? The sound doesn’t work right? oh sorry gotta run out the door.
The efficiency argument and latency are in direct fucking opposition because in order to have acceptable latency you need to have a bunch of server racks near people which absolutely ruins the economics.
Why your TV as a screen is shit
Not positioned in a useful way or with a reasonable DPI or non-shit text rendering , nowhere useful to put the keyboard that is non-awful, pure voice input to use a computer is complete trash
Conclusion
Local clients that don’t suck are going to be basic bitch small form factor PCs with ethernet and wired speakers because those things always work and always work well. If you don’t fuck them up by running complete garbage they already run windows or linux reasonably well without issue. If you need a lot of processing power for AI you can run THAT in the cloud… which is already a thing.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 2 days ago
I also included ARM desktop boxes like what Google is trying to push Android on in a partnership with Qualcomm lately in that too, basically, any ARM device regardless of whether it’s a phone or tablet, or a cheap desktop box, will work for your ‘local PC’ (aka. a thin client) in a cloud rental scheme.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A tablet screen is too small to use with apps not designed for such a screen. So it will be 100% useless without an actual monitor. Your TV is shit its got shitty text rendering, its massive, and if its 1080p 50" its DPI is shit if its 4K is barely acceptable you are too far from it to be usefully used and you have nowhere to put an actual keyboard.
During operation it will be decoding video 100% of the time so its battery life will be trash on a typical tablet battery and it will get hot.
You could solve all those problems by putting the hardware in a shell with or without fans a bigger battery a keyboard and a screen. Oh look we just re-invented the laptop! Except it only works at all in areas where you have wifi and it costs $30-$50 $50-80 if you have no upfront cost and have to pay for the hardware a month and either you have to manage updates and potential failures on both client and server OR only on the client but the server OS is so constrained that you have no control over it. It is worse and more expensive.
Do please explain what exactly one does with just a slow tablet? Do you use your finger to scroll the too big interface constantly on a laggy interface on your bad wifi whilst your virtual computer slows to a crawl when too many people are home OR do you squint at the poorly sized blurry interface 8 feet away on your 50" 1080p?
People already understand and buy laptops. Why will they buy this?