The first Amazon PC is free
Whoa lets not go too far off the crazy cliff now.
They will sell it like streaming services or printers and ink. The first Amazon PC is free, then the subscription price and amount of ads go up. Eventually people will stick because all their files are there, and their Amazon PC does not support mass storage devices like USB sticks to download all of their work.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Soup@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think they’re saying, in a literal sense but still, something like “the first hit is free”. These companies have made us all poor enough to be easily attracted to these “deals” and once we have no choice they screw us directly.
Walmart had that as their whole thing, maybe still do. Go into a town and undercut the fuck out of their local businesses, using other Walmart locations as welfare providers, and then jacking up prices once the competition has been obliterated and no one has the capital to bring them back because half the town works at the big box store that doesn’t pay them fuck-all.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You would actually need server racks at major ISPs colocated near customers (like netflix does now) to have acceptable latency. To have acceptable performance you would need a cheap small form factor PC, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse.
None of this is free and if not fucked up on the software side would perform fine as far as normal computing tasks by itself.
GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2 days ago
Look how much a Chromebook costs. Amazon can afford to sell them at a loss now, if they can charge you $20/month later or so, stuff ads into everything or bundle it with other Amazon services to make it appear like. Good deal. The question is not “how much can we make on this hardware”, but "how much can we get from the customer over 5 years.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It can’t be free because it costs too much. You need data centers near customers for acceptable latency. You also need a computer to connect to your amazon PC.
No your phone won’t work. To prove this. Get a really expensive phone that you can a keyboard and display to. This is already a thing right. Run a remote desktop software on your actual PC wired vastly preferred. Now go next door and ensure you have acceptable wifi. Try this out and tell me how it works for you.
Now imagine it with average wifi which is often terrible in my households with the shitty phones people have creating an experience that is orders of magnitude best case scenario we have created above.