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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought "another RDP solution" but then I saw this line:

  Windows 365 also creates a new hybrid personal computing category called Cloud PC, which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device...

Does that mean it makes use of local hardware past the capabilities it would need as a thin client? GPU acceleration, etc? It'll be interesting to find out.

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I think you're reading too much into it. Sure, it's possible that they have some sort of RDMA technology that allows you to automagically offload work from your local machine to a cloud GPU/CPU, but I doubt it. My guess is that it'll be something lame like "having a synced workspace (aka onedrive) and being able to edit documents on it locally and have it synced to your cloud workspace"

Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised to see cloud auth (AD) so you can pay every month to use the capabilities of your local PC that you already paid for.

Buy a PC so you can remote into a crappier cloud PC? Pass. Lol.

It's probably something like the Teams integration VMWare shipped in Horizon (in collaboration with Microsoft).

https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/microsoft-teams-optimiz...

They must be talking about run of the mill RDP stuff like using USB Redirection, multi-touch support, and so on to make the remote machine feel local.

Windows Server has had something like this for a while, it's called RemoteFX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteFX

I guess we'll have to wait to see if this is just a rebranding of the same thing or something new.

Doesn't remotefx just render on the server which seems different then what's being described here?

According to other sources, Microsoft will reveal Windows 365 pricing on Aug. 2, when the service becomes generally available.

Cool to see RDP-ish type capabilities outside of tech circles but will wait until the price is revealed. My guess is that it will still be out of reach for most consumers, unfortunately.

My guess is $10-20 / month for an anemic VM that runs like a raspberry pi.

Leaked pricing was $31 USD for 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. It does have 10 Gbps download and 4 Gbps upload though!

4GB RAM? That gets you a whole 2 browser tabs.

Or half an instance of VS Code.

It's like they've never even used their own browser(Edge/Chrome) or something. 4GB for a Windows OS is hilarious.

They will just update Edge to sleep background tabs like mobile OSs do. Most phones have 4gb or less ram and load websites just fine. Might also encorage web devs to cut down on bloat if they are targeting a 4gb windows vm.

> 10 Gbps download and 4 Gbps upload though!

That's great but considering most ISPs in the US are still < 100Mbit on the download and cap the upload at something ridiculous like 10Mbit, 10Gbps on the server side isn't going to be much use.

Even my workplace caps at around 100Mbps upload meaning uploading a 64GB video off an SD card to my "cloud PC" will take forever.

Maybe this will help...

What is hybrid cloud? https://www.netapp.com/hybrid-cloud/what-is-hybrid-cloud/

well, being able to print to a local printer or access a local usb-drive is making use of the "capabilities of the device", and certainly within the grasp of boring good old technologies over RDP

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