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Comment by aniforprez | Hacker News Reader

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?

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There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.)

There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)

> Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface?

Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop.

Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, whereas the remote browser can improve over time.

I had Macbooks that lasted 5 years (2010-2015) pretty well, my current MBA M1 is almost 2 years old and I don't see myself needing to swap it for another 2-3 at least. My girlfriend still uses her MBA from 2014.

I don't really see how I could justify paying 20-25% of the price of my laptop per year, that I use for much more than just browsing, to have a faster browsing experience. And I'm a power user (SWE, etc.) compared to the mainstream consumer, the market for this product seems to be extremely niche/small.

Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay, service downtime.

I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.

Ironically BAAS is sold for security reasons too. As in isolation. You'd do very sensitive stuff with the remote browser, or vice versa, for isolation from other activity.

There's a lot of people gaslit into thinking browsers are a janky slow mess because they've been using Chrome for so long.

Hence why M1 killed them.

Some people do all their work in browsers.

but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.

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