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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud"

Our personal devices are far from thin clients.

Depends on the app, and the personal device. Mobile devices are increasingly thin clients. Of course hardware-wise they are fully capable personal computers, but ridiculous software-imposed limitations make that increasingly difficult.

"Thin" can be interpreted as relative, no?

I think it depends on if you see the browser for content or as a runtime environment.

Maybe it depends on the application architecture...? I.e., a compute-heavy WASM SPA at one end vs a server-rendered website.

Or is it an objective measure?

But that is what they are mostly used for.

On phones, most of the compute is used to render media files and games, and make pretty animated UIs.

The text content of a weather app is trivial compared to the UI.

Same with many web pages.

Desktop apps use local compute, but that's more a limitation of latency and network bandwidth than any fundamental need to keep things local.

Security and privacy also matter to some people. But not to most.

Speak for yourself. Many people don't daily-drive anything more advanced than an iPad.

IPads are incredibly advanced. Though I guess you mean they don't use anything that requires more sophistication from the user (or something like that)?

The Ipad is not a thin client, is it?

It is, for the vast majority of users.

Turn off internet on they iPad and see how many apps that people use still work.

I'm not questioning whether the Ipad can be used as a client in some capacity, or whether people tend to use it as a client. I question whether the Ipad is a thin client. The answer to that question doesn't lie in how many applications require an internet connection, but in how many applications require local computational resources.

The Ipad is a high performance computer, not just because Apple think that's fun, but out of necessity given its ambition: the applications people use on it require local storage and rather heavy local computation. The web browser standards if nothing else have pretty much guaranteed that the age of thin clients is over: a client needs to supply a significant amount of computational resources and storage to use the web generally. Not even Chromebooks will practically be anything less than rich clients.

Going back to the original topic (and source of the analogy), IOS hosts an on-device large language model.

As with everything, the lines are a bit blurred these days. We may need a new term for these devices. But despite all the compute and storage and on-device models these supercomputers are barely a step above thin clients.

No, its a poor anology, I'm old enough to have used a Wyse terminal. That's what I think of when I hear dumb terminal. It was dumb.

Maybe a PC without a hard drive (PXE the OS), but if it has storage and can install software, its not dumb.

We may want a new term for our devices :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45808654

I mean, Chromebooks really aren't very far at all from thin clients. But even my monster ROG laptop when it's not gaming is mostly displaying the results of computation that happened elsewhere

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