Amazon's $195 thin clients are repurposed Fire TV Cubes

That has not matched my experience at all, either.

Sure, some laptops never seem to make it back, but generally, their last paycheck isn't released until the gear is back and checked.

'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation, (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in place at the time of layoffs, ect).

Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.

Something like 80% of all stats are made up on the spot

Even if it were true though, look at Amazon Workspaces prices. 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 10GB of user storage and 80GB of root volume storage, $876/yr.

I think you can get a 4-core laptop with 16GB of RAM for $876 + $195 for the client, and afford to lose it at these prices; unless somehow your turnover rate is obscene; or you are an industry with extremely high security needs.

My initial reflex reaction is to think the same: however, when I consider what the process would be, I can see a lot of large businesses just not seeing it being worth it to track down and retrieve company hardware from an employee who left under negative circumstances. Most laptops, especially issued to lower rungs of employees, aren't new, and even when they were, weren't high-end machines to begin with: they're probably the bottom tier really, whatever Dell or HP were selling at clearance prices when IT had extra budget.

So let's pick a number out of a hat and say a laptop was $500 new, and for the sake of argument, let's say it was brand new when issued to a problematic remote employee several states away. This employee eventually gets canned for bad performance and doesn't ever ship back the computer: now what? Well, you have to spool up your legal division and arrange for a certified mail letter to let the employee know of their obligation, and see that it's delivered so the employee can't claim later they were never told. Then, you'd probably have to arrange for some company representative to actually go there and attempt to recover it in person, for similar reasons. If that doesn't work (and IANAL so this is just theory) you'd end up either involving their local law enforcement and probably your own to recover stolen property, OR going to small claims court against the employee. You'd have to have paper work in order showing when the laptop was purchased, what it's worth now to recover, and it's probably an open and shut case really to get it done, but then... you get a laptop back, or the cash value of it which is probably nowhere near what the company paid for it, and if it was sold off or junked or otherwise ruined and you DO get a cash settlement from court, well, now you have to COLLECT that which is it's own can of worms, especially if this employee is really pissed off with your organization.

Every step along this involves your legal team, which consists at least partially of lawyers, who are expensive to have work on it. This will be labor intensive, not step by step but over the long haul: instead of a big job, it's tons and tons of little small annoying ones.

AND: If the employee wants and I can't think of why they wouldn't, they could easily go to the media and vilify you for shit-canning them and then suing them. And sure, the facts of that would be obviously vindicating, but how many people read past headlines? Corporations fucking over working people is (rightly) hot news lately.

So like, yeah that sounds high, I wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't that high. But also I wouldn't be shocked if faced with all the fuckabout to get a shitty laptop back from an ex-call center worker or whatever, most companies just don't give a fuck and write it off like they would any other lost asset.

Well, the effort required to get a laptop back from a different country is in almost all cases more expensive than what the thing is worth. Even MacBook Pro's are barely worth half the original price after 2-3 years (particularly with Apple's pace of innovation), and most Windows laptops literally fall apart at the hinges at that point so they're worthless anyway.

Yes, you can theoretically go and iCloud-lock the thing to make it worth even less, but the machine still has value for its (non-serialed) parts.

Agreed, "As many as" is doing some heavy lifting. The only anecdotal evidence I have in support of this claim is how some companies included the employee's laptops as part of severance packages throughout the "forced RTO" layoffs in the past year.

My partner works for a company that uses thin clients to aws instances and they get about half of the hardware back. They don’t even attempt to get the monitors back.

I know two people issued remote computers; a desktop and a laptop. They were not asked for them back and one was a MacBook Pro.

I got a MBP from Goldman Sachs and when I left they refused to pay for mailing it back, which was irritating because it's also activation locked to their IT systems and is therefore useless to everyone. I would say that not all companies want their obsolete client systems returned to inventory.

Yes. And if that's internal AWS statistics then I am moving my stuff out of AWS very quickly.

I think the preceding sentence has some important context.

They're specifically talking about businesses with high employee turnover, like call centers:

> Amazon said its thin client targets businesses with high employee turnover, such as call and payment processing centers, where AWS customers say it can be hard to recover expensive, work-issued devices.

I would be willing to believe it, but only with the caveat that the companies tell employees to just keep the hardware.

I've known of at least one company that would tell devs to keep their old equipment that cycled out as a perk. I've also known quite a few IT teams that basically don't care about a 3-4 year old Dell/HP/whatever and are just as happy to have you keep it as they are to ship it back, wipe it, and recycle it.

You sound like someone not fit for upper management IT. You clearly care about your end users.

> I'm actually a bit disappointed they didn't implement this as a laptop (or plan to?).

It sounds like the idea behind it is to reduce the incentives for theft. Making it a laptop would do the opposite.

The article specifically mentions that these are intended for work environments with high rates of computer equipment theft. That would only happen at significant magnitude if labor rates are very low.

The US national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and usually jobs that pay that have very high turnover, so there's a strong incentive to steal equipment, especially if it has any resale value, like a $500 PC would.

If these things can be remotely bricked once they are reported as stolen, that goes pretty far to killing any black market for them.

The box has one job: to stream a Remote Desktop from a virtual machine running at AWS. You could do this with a FireTV stick if it wasn't for the need to attach a keyboard and mouse.

If the workspace thing takes off you can be sure this will be cost reduced to a disposable item while the cloud instances get faster.

Point is they don't have to buy them, they already made too many.

There are a number of advantages you get by deploying cloud computers instead of physical ones (like laptops), and most have nothing to do with fairness. The ability to control what gets installed on them gives you obvious security and performance advantages, as well as allowing you to quickly and easily 'service' the computers (restore them to working order by loading a known good image). Disallowing employees from downloading data to devices in their possession also reduces 'leaks' of sensitive corporate information due to carelessness.

I've never heard of anyone making a 'fairness' argument about sending out laptops, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere has made it.

most companies send employees laptops with mdm, recorded serial numbers, etc. sure, an employee that decides to fafo with laptop theft is going to cause a hassle, but it should be much more of a hassle for the former employee.

this has nothing to do with hardware, in fact that’s the point. this little cube is useless outside of a single use case. go ahead and take it, it’s just hardware, and will likely be no more than that once stolen.

Nah, they don't care about that. In my experience it's more about ease of administration and data loss prevention.

I work in an industry where an extreme amount of effort is expended in ensuring the employees do not walk out with data. Effort is spent keeping production network separate from corporate network to the point that checking email is done through a remote connection. USB devices are filled with epoxy, and the USB drivers are removed from the OS.

Putting everything in the cloud would be the next logical step in preventing all of the thiefs, er, employees from being able to remove data from the building. Now, just to convince all of the clients that their data is actually safer in the cloud than on-prem.

It doesn't make sense at all. You can take screenshots of your shitty terminal with your phone.

This is rent seeking dressed up in security paranoia.