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Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud
(www.theregister.com)
aka a thin-client
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
244 points (96.9% liked)
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The circle of computing: thin-thick-thin-thick-thin
Absolutely. These existed years ago, I remember putting them in for a client. I also put in Sun Java Stations for another client. Neither of these were "cloud" but they were both running what we now call commonly Virtual Desktop Environments (VDI) from on-premises servers.
Yeah I love how people are panning it and laughing, but thin clients are bread and butter to most enterprises. I think we have around 1,800 deployed at last count. The price is competitive and if you’ve gone all in on the Microsoft ecosystem it makes sense.
What is their endgame here? Why do people want this also
25 years ago we were using SUN thin clients connected to a single huge server on campus. Shortly after they were replaced with thick Dell PCs running XP.
Priced it out for my company, and I don't understand where this makes sense in any way. You spend a shit ton more for the server you get less for end users and thin clients are still expensive. Plus, bonus, you now have a single point of failure. Or at least a small handful if you duplicate properly.
Converting that cost into a perpetual monthly bill isn't going to change it magically
Well they make a lot of sense if you can't trust your clients.
My high school's computer lab were all thin clients. I was told each cost like 20$ (wouldn't be surprised if he exaggerated the cheapness a bit), and the server was being used for more than just the thin clients, anyway.
The server for this product is Microsofts cloud, so there is no server cost, you're just bought into their ecosystem and maybe a slightly higher subscription cost.
It also means little to no hardware maintenance and streamlined IT processes.
I'm bot saying it's my kind of approach, but there are definitely a lot of companies that could benefit (given most people are really just using a browser and maybe some word/PowerPoint software).
They are (can be) cheap. Dependent on whatever remote desktop service you use, though.
For simple office work, you don't really need much to stand up a set of thin clients other than a good network and peripheral hardware.
A Dell thin client goes for like $300-500 while a full desktop is $1000-1500 from them (actual prices may vary by company contract), so it's typically less upfront cost, especially if your company is already using a remote desktop service.
The remote desktop aspect is nice in a few ways, can use whatever thin client and all your stuff is there, but you lose out on stuff like GPU acceleration and at least where I worked where we mainly used thin clients, can be very laggy compared to native.
If they knew what they wanted, they wouldn't use Windows.
It's a brilliant move on Microsoft's part. Idiot Veeps who can't install anything on their own computers will buy them by the truckload for their "technology enablement groups" to do "amazing AI things in the cloud" with.
There was a very, very brief point in human history when fucking chuds who smarmed their way over from Sales didn't run IT.
🤣 my last boss was the president of the consortium's IT company. He came from sales and didn't know shit about anything IT related. Dude was the worst boss I've ever had.
How i see this "box":
Blessed by Stephen Hawking himself
Sure, let's just move your personal desktop to someone else's computer where you don't even own the data. What could possibly go wrong?
This isn't targeted at personal desktops. This is for enterprise use, where you didn't own the data in the first place.
You're right. It's still stupid though.
Companies should be at least as concerned with privacy and autonomy as individuals. Running everything on Microsoft Clouds, with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office makes you massively vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft. And many of the potential customers are actually Microsoft's competitors on some level.
Thin clients may be a good model for some businesses, but this device particularly seems to be tailored to use only Microsoft's Azure cloud as opposed to self-hosting. Moving the computation to Microsoft's cloud doesn't make it inherently safer.
I worked in (Canadian) government for a while and we used our desktops as thin clients in a way. That wasn’t the intended use of our desktops but the office internet was just so insanely locked down that nearly every site was blocked. Like trying to watch a YouTube tutorial? Blocked. Trying to read a forum thread to debug something? Blocked. It was stupid.
We all just ended up RPCing into Azure VMs because we’d actually be able to do our work that way.
Not super related but something I think about sometimes lol
They announced these at Ignite last year along with a swath of Copilot modules.
The goal is to provide low cost alternatives to either
-
Upgrading existing systems to win11, if the hardware supports it.
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Offering a "low cost" alternative to an additional $30 for an extended year of win10 support.
Long term goal is to move Windows completely to a subscription model either way. Little Black Boxes are just initial way to present this as an overall savings to the Enterprise Market. And I believe it will work to some degree on the quarterly focused businesses that are already balls deep in Microsoft's ecosystem's. There is an unfathomable amount of win10 systems still in use across the globe and they are fast nearing EOS.
This was the last straw for me, swapped to Linux Mint at the beginning of the year and I haven't had any major issues yet!
"Move Windows to the 'Cloud' "
Only $349 + whatever the Window Live subscription fee is, now. What an idiotic idea.
Probably an ARM computer running skeleton Windows and RDP.
Why bother with such a thing when a NUC could do the compute locally in the same form-factor? Other than corpo data theft paranoia, but the risk of lost productivity from cloud failure seems a bigger risk than that.
Microsoft reintroduces the dumb terminal
Yawn. That compute model worked OK for some corporate setups 20 years ago. Granted RDP has improved.
It's wireless, Jen.
so this is for me if i have a cloudy vision?