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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Enterprise drives shipments and the PC industry is fucked because: the surge of Windows 7 migration is over, they’ve become appliances, and everyone bought thousands of laptops in 2020/1.

The only reasons to replace business desktops are swollen batteries and Microsoft. My teams are responsible for 250k devices globally. Failure rates are <3%, and 75% of failures are batteries and power supplies. With the transition away from spinning rust complete, we have more keyboard failures than desktop PC failure. I’m taking the PC refresh savings and buying Macs, iPads and meeting room hardware.

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Speaking from the smaller scale side of IT, in the past ~6 months or so, I've deployed more BeeLinks ( https://smile.amazon.com/Beelink-Graphics-Desktop-Computers-... ) or even smaller, Atom-powered boxes ( https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Nucbox5-Desktop-Computer-Windo... ) than Lenovos or Dells. And my clients are really happy with them, too. These are, of course, still technically PC shipments, but the amount of money involved for the manufacturers is absolutely minimal. And most office workers don't need more.

Yep, tech work, and especially remote software work, is all done with laptops and docks.

I'm writing this from my home gaming rig, which is an old, not-cool-enough-for-Win-11 (thank god), desktop. I don't know what I'll be replacing it with when it keels over and dies. Maybe a Mac tower? Maybe a Linux rig. But it'll be my PC, not Microsoft's if I can help it.

mac mini is probably enough these days

especially with the M2 Pro refresh... it's practically a studio at that point.

Apple is conspiciously maintaining some differentiation like larger RAM sizes to force some people to the studio but the distinction really is slim at this point. Better cooling I guess? But M2 is not a hot chip. Maybe a few more thunderbolt ports?

cooling will matter if you're using it for larger workloads and renders.

I think is largely correct, I’ve been working remotely for the better part of 10 years. I used laptops for around 6. The portability is great when I was split between multiple jobs.

Changed to a desktop about 3 years ago and wouldn’t go back unless I really needed that portability again. I had forgotten how much faster a well spec’d desktop machine actually is. And upgrading parts I find a lot better than replacing the whole laptop every 2-3 years.

Currently on a Ryzen 5950x, 64gb ram, multiple gen 4 ssds, and a workstation GPU. The only laptops to beat such a setup in most tasks weigh a lot, cost more than double the desktop, and are 2 years newer.

And then you can still use SyncThing[0] to share things. Depending on what you're doing of course, and how friendly the applications you use for it are to being used that way.. but if it's all in the browser and email profiles and a bunch of data files, you're golden. Getting used to that "lifestyle" has been the biggest leap in joy of using computers since SSD, for me personally.

[0] And/or FreeFileSync or similar for manual operation: I don't want e.g. browser profile data to be synced while the browser is in use, and running the sync manually is no biggie at all.

So what do you use when you're not WFH?

> The only reasons to replace business desktops are swollen batteries and Microsoft.

Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. Windows 11 is the garbage one everyone is going to skip, but will Windows 12 require the same?

TPM 2.0 is old table stakes, circa 2014-2015. The processor requirement (8th gen Intel) is probably more of a concern, but even that is almost 6 years old at this point. I'd wager most business laptops/desktops are Win 11 ready, though that doesn't mean anyone wants it.

TPM 2.0 existed in 2015. That doesn't mean every PC purchased then has it.

But the general point is that they keep coming up with things like this.

Compare modern CPUs to ones from ten years ago and they're maybe twice as fast per core, and have more cores which applications the majority of people use don't support. For most people the ten year old machine is perfectly adequate.

But it doesn't have TPM 2.0 or whatever, and the copy of Windows 7 it came with is no longer supported, so you eventually have to buy a new one (or stop using any supported version of Windows).

It's the same scam with phones but even worse there, because at least I can install an up to date version of Linux on a ten year old PC. Or a twenty year old one for that matter.

hardware TPM is only required if your CPU doesn't support it as an onboard thing... almost all Ryzens have TPM 2.0 support via fTPM for example.

And the hard requirement for a TPM is only for OEM procurement anyway. You as a company can probably put Win11 on anything you want, just build your image and deploy it same as ever.

Even if you can technically do it, many people won't know that when making purchasing decisions, or won't want to run hardware that isn't officially supported.

Meanwhile the requirement means third party software can soon start relying on all recent hardware having that feature and you may soon run into trouble if your hardware doesn't have it.

"Nobody got fired for buying IBM" was a thing for a reason. If you spend the same amount you did last year on new PCs, nobody asks questions. If you put the money somewhere else and then after three years Enterprise Vault Thing 4.0 comes out and requires TPM 2.0, the CEO is mad because you need three years worth of budget in one year to replace all the old PCs.

Smarter companies will find better ways to avoid this, but 50% of companies are below average.

Updooted yesterday but didn't have time to respond, but yup, fair.

Again though I think the fact that soft-TPM has existed for a long time softens that blow. If you have Intel 8000 series or higher or Ryzen 2000 series or higher (iirc) then you have TPM 2.0. Do you need a standalone TPM for a specific reason? Or maybe calling it "soft" is even a misnomer, it's hardware, it's iTPM vs dTPM I guess.

And sure at an enterprise scale going forward why not, it's ten bucks at scale. But it just seems like a lot of todo about nothing... your legacy machines can be imaged up if you want, everything purchased in the last 5 years has hardware support already, and yeah you can toss a whole second module in going forward if you want. But I don't see a hard barrier here to keep enterprise from moving to Win11.

Especially given how much hardware was purchased during COVID WFH... all of that stuff already has support, it's really only stuff that is 2+ years pre-covid that is even an issue.

I wonder if anyone has done some large scale testing on just restricting laptop charging to 80% or around that mark. I swear the large PC vendors charge these things to "full 100%" for the extra 30 minutes on some shitty video endurance benchmark and it ends up causing bloating batteries at alarming rates.

If desktop OSes stopped being garbage maybe they'd attract users back. Win still has the ti lol r crap, Linux is suffering under snaps and usual deck chair reshuffling and osx is apple imprisoned, and neglected regardless.

> I’m taking the PC refresh savings and buying Macs, iPads and meeting room hardware.

What's the failure rate of Macs?

We measure them differently because of lower volume and a self service model - they are more like phones to us. Anecdotally, M1s so far are like iPads.

agree except for the spinning rust part.. BackBlaze stats and I agree, spinning disks can be reliable.

In the datacenter - absolutely. In a PC, different story. Poor thermals, rough handling and dust are brutal to mechanical parts. Solid state stuff will survive even outside of its typical operating temperature range.

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