Microsoft announces new "mini PCs" for Windows 365

These companies do not know their customer base and it costs them.

I do see these devices making way more sense for enterprise on the other hand, to the dismay of many. But for the average consumer maybe not. I assume they are going to recycle the same tech they are using to let you stream Xbox games.

If Windows wasnt so damned bloated this wouldnt cost them much. Every Windows laptop that was nearing its end of life became magically better and still in my house all 15 years later after I installed Linux. Wild.

The leadership doesn’t believe egress is expensive.

And neither do the customers believe it.

However the customers are okay paying the egress price. So it stays, regardless of what leadership or customers say.

But you need to meet pretty high licensing requirements, e.g. for enterprise:

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 E3, and Microsoft 365 E5, including versions of these suites that do not include Microsoft Teams, as well as Microsoft 365 A3, Microsoft 365 A5, and Microsoft 365 Education Student Use Benefit.

Which means around 20€ per month for business premium. They are also managed in intune, so you need someone with intune expertise.

These services are for Microsoft, to serve Microsoft's business needs at the customer's expenses.

Look at Azure and how it designed it's products around the concept of accounts. Azure is supposed to be a cloud provider but their offering is built around charging customers for provisioning dedicated hardware that users then can run their apps on.

Even their function-as-a-service offer requires you to pay por the dedicated hardware where to deploy your event handlers.

If you look at Azure as Active Directory/Entra ID attracting and locking in enterprise accounts, you start to see these service account products as a way to price gouge customers. You have customers locked in with the auth system who then have to manage competing pressures such as "I need to keep my azure resources independent of other teams/projects" and "why do I need to pay 100$/month for a dedicated app service plan with two cores if all I want is a small internal app that might run the occasional background job"

If I remember correctly, battery level was practically the only "offline feature" of the pin. A device whose only working feature is to check its own battery level isn't much use.

In the first paragraph

> In 2024, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Link, a thin client for accessing the service, and today, the company is expanding the lineup with two more devices from its partners.

It was mostly fine-ish except for some annoyances like streaming audio being fairly sketchy for the era which bothered the techs who normally spent like ten hours a day listening to Pandora on headphones while making repairs.

Ended up having to block it to maintain decent performance for everyone because it bogged down the 100 Mbit LAN which resulted in a lot of grumbling and unhappy people. I imagine it's more viable these days.

The clients themselves were pretty cool though: cheap, booted almost instantly and ran cold. Until that job I had no idea how efficient RDP was as providing a near realtime experience even when bandwidth constrained.

At my current job there are a couple VMs I can only use via RDP and I honestly forget I'm even using it most of the time until the occasional random glitch reminds me.

Variable costs means you never want to over invest in unused cores and memory, which leads to over subscribing those cores and memory… that’s fine for normal working hours, except Monday mornings when everyone starts logging in at once.

You can’t really queue logins that in a way that doesn’t make users think they’re using an infuriatingly slow machine.

Apple still quietly designing all their products on Windows these days? Not that there's anything wrong with that...