Microsoft announces new "mini PCs" for Windows 365
neowin.net35 points by mikece 3 days ago
35 points by mikece 3 days ago
I find it morbidly fascinating how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software" and "the backend DCs to support this have to be built everywhere to reduce latency" plus "we can't bill this in any way that is correlative to our costs, because it won't make any sense to buyers", yet "we'll price it at a level that cannot possibly make sense for anyone except the most niche buyers".
Like, even at the most basic level: The kind of buyer that might be interested in this might actually be interested in something like per-minute pricing. If you only need Windows or Xbox Streaming for a few hours a month, just charge per minute. But they don't price it like that. Instead, a 2vcpu/8gb/256gb machine is $50/month. A similar machine from HP would cost, like, $400. And the best part is, if someone actually used it 8 hours per day, 20 days a month, 1080p60: That's like ~$28 in the cheapest tier of Azure bandwidth costs. And, I guess, you have to also buy a thin client device.
Just very unclear who any of these services are for.
Remember when Google did this and it failed because PC gamers dont want 1700 stores for games. They just want Steam or GOG.
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.
Google failed with Stadia because no sane AAA company would want to risk App/Play Store terms. The offering maybe made sense for A companies, but Google's requirements were too much for them (their marketing certain wasn't there). Google ended up subsidizing a few AAA companies, and then it fell to typical Google kill-it-now cost cutting. Microsoft has existing relationships and won't have this problem.
The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.
I mean GeForce Now is still going and PS+ streaming is surprisingly playable.
I think people just didn't want Google.
Google stupidly positioned their service as if it was a separate console you had to buy games for, which then couldn’t be played anywhere else. The successful streaming services sell you games for non-streaming platforms and then just allow you to stream them as an option.
I think the reasons are a little more boring, that it was a combination of different reasons that contributed to Stadia’s failure.
20/40/70 GB of outbound data is included, depending on the tier.
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.
And InTune needs user's to put Edge on their devices, which means a significant set of users will just give up being able to open links on their phone from work apps. That puts a drag on productivity which is definitely more costly than 20€ per month.
> how leadership at the same company can simultaneously believe all of "network egress is a staggeringly expensive component of data center rollout" yet "we should stream real-time input and video instead of shipping client software"
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.
Are you suggesting that low latency video isn't expensive? That goes against everything I've ever heard from people at streaming platforms. The costs are high enough to be a major competitive moat for some of the biggest companies on the planet (e.g. Google's YouTube).
> Just very unclear who any of these services are for.
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"
Echoes of https://web.archive.org/web/20250424025507/https://support.h...
3. Can I still use my Ai Pin for offline features?
Yes. After February 28, 2025, Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access.> Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc.
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.
Hopefully they support Linux in case Microsoft decides the hardware in them is no longer good enough in the future.
This is targeting the elusive market segment of "companies who want to implement VDI, but are too stupid to deploy VDI".
To be fair it’s a notoriously difficult thing to plan for. It’s less about incompetence, and more about having a strong understanding of user requirements, and a streamlined way to allocate costs to each business area based on their needs. That’s really hard for any company or MSP to do.
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.
But autoscale is a feature of azure virtual desktop. It's also much easier to deploy than citrix. So that makes this offering even weirder.
Hospitals are about to go for this product like fucking catnip. It's all they've ever wanted for the fleet of 10k dumb client devices that all run Epic and nothing else.
Didn't we do this already a couple dozen years ago?
Is this thin-pc terminals?
I remember my first internship for a Boeing subcontractor in 2010ish went all-in on thin clients for like half the company of 200 employees or so. But with an on-prem Windows Terminal Server as the backend for RDP.
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.
This is for corporations too incompetent or too lazy to deploy Citrix infra, so they'd rather rent it from Microsoft As A Service. VDI can be very expensive so this could be win-win.
That’s exactly what I thought. They look like very thin client I’ve come across and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a rebadge.
Yes, that was a first party product, now third party vendors are releasing their equivalent.
No one reads articles, they just ask questions based on the headline
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.
what in hell is "Windows 365" ? Windows 11 ?Defunct Office 365 now Copilot ? Will this thing be renamed "Windows Copilot" eventually becoming even more confusing as M$ knows to do oh so well ?
I had the same question as you. Then I read TFA and discovered that the question was answered in the first paragraph of TFA.
> Sorry, you have been blocked, you are unable to access Neowin.
That's the first (and only) paragraph of TFA for me.
Until I found out reading the article I have thought the headline was a joke and I was going to end up on a think piece or satire.
I want this for two reasons - Solidworks - the non cloud version, doesn't run on my MacBook. I don't want to have two full sized computers. Steam - again, too many games don't run on Macs.
I'd also go for a single click launch of a GPU powered virtual machine I can remote onto from my Mac. You'd think the various cloud providers would offer a single click solution. I haven't found it.
If you're doing any serious CAD work you really need a Windows PC, and better yet a config that is ISV approved and tested.
Apple still quietly designing all their products on Windows these days? Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Price ? HW config ? Benchmarks ?
I understand why Microsoft would want this, but why on earth would a consumer want this?
You will own nothing, and be happy. Except that there's a second hidden choice.
Watch it block Linux. Just more enshittification to make sure you don't own anything and these corporations own you.