A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
This is actually terrifying. Switching to Linux will help us for a while, and the community can take us a long way, but eventually the hardware in physical PCs won’t be able to perform basic functions. Maybe it’s because cloud PCs use vastly more power and web designers inefficiently update to a web 4.0 that won’t be accessible on older hardware – this has happened before. Or it’ll be because the cloud PCs have access to Wi-Fi cards or a new technology entirely to connect that physical hardware won’t have access to – already a standard practice with cell phones’ arbitrary gsm phaseouts.
A phaseout of physical hardware would also entail a phaseout of physical accessories, so you can’t data-horde your way out of this one unless, maybe, you invested in the now-rare M-Disc format and the drives that make them work. You can buy external offline storage for a while, but eventually it’ll all get bought up on the used market or otherwise fail in 5-10 years after the last hard drives get made for consumers. Eventually you will lose all your files and have no way to back them up. No Jellyfin server for movies you legally ripped, no GOG installers for games you legally bought, no music library or ebooks either, they’ll all be gone, stolen, so you buy it all over again in perpetuity.
Our only hope, really, is small businesses continuing to build physical PCs with equal power as the cloud devices. But would parts manufacturers let them? The current situation with data centers, SDDs, and RAM shows that parts manufacturers are increasingly only interested in selling to other large businesses. Consumers can’t boycott that.
I fully expect to be unable to access my bank or make appointments or get meaningful employment if I don’t switch over in 10 to 20 years.
Murica is a deranged shithole. Linux is our only way out of this. To all hardware manifacturers: Build your goddamn drivers for it and free us!
~cry in the capitalist vacuum…
Amazon sucks
fucking microsoft too. they’re enshittifying things so much because they can charge you rent to compute instead
Internet and access to servers is the first thing that govts turn off when they get uppity.
Seems like a fatal risk to have online only services.
Perfect! And after that we can rent our phones from the cloud too. Maybe our electric cars after that?
i will never in my life get any subscription to anything, that doesnt have to be a subscription.
so far i’m fine with:
internet connection and my phone number
Yeah… actually how the fuck are we still paying a subscription for our phone number? That’s frick’n bull-crap!
utilities?
That’s more a bill for what you used.
Thats not a subscription IMO
Neither is rent or food
No thanks, I’m good.
Literally no reason to live if you have to subscribe for air.
No reason to hold back then, this planet is not big enough for billionaires.
The video where Bezos says that is from Dec 4th 2024 sooooo
I love how the author keeps bringing up how expensive it would be to implement a system of cloud computing rental because no one would pay the amount it would require to make such a thing profitable. But we’re talking about Jeff bezos here who took billions of dollars worth of loss for over 10 years before making Amazon the profit machine that it is now. Simply by making things cheaper for a long period of time until the customer base eas so used to the model that they could picture doing it any other way and their competition went out of business. I can totally foresee them doing this exact thing with cloud computing. Make it really cheap get people hooked where they have gotten rid of all of their in person computers and then, once access to home computing is either prohibitively expensive or impossible to do because parts are no longer available or otherwise impossible for people to switch away, jack up the price and make it profitable by squeezing every dime out of the average consumer.
This was also, by the way, Netflix’s strategy as well as Spotify and all the other cloud-based services that people are “addicted to”. Take billions and loss to get people used to your service and not consider any alternative. Then once you have a captive audience shoot that price to the Moon.
amazon uplink terminal;
This has been tried, and it sucked and failed every time.
Tbh I think the Sun Ray thin terminals were pretty cool at the time. Not really cloud because it was an enterprise product 20 years ago, so they used servers hosted by the enterprise. But at the time this idea of taking my entire desktop session with me via my employee badge felt pretty cool. Of course only supporting X11 sessions on Solaris meant that nobody outside Sun wanted it though but that’s not really a problem with the concept as such.
I think it would be cool to self host a thin client system for my household. One main server with everything and I can manage it to ensure that it’s working as it should. Thin clients that myself and fam would interact with for regular use.
Actually, I think I just want an easy way to have my pc in another room so I can use it without having to deal with the heat and noise.
Regardless, the important part is that it’s in my house and under my control. The lack of control is why previous thin client scams were scams and sucked.
Yeah but that was before you had billionaires of this size able to manipulate entire markets in this capacity.
yeah. Brain likes to think that it’s still 2011.
Genuenly I refuse to use cloud PCs, I don’t give a fuck how “cheap” they are or how “convenient” they are I ain’t using it. If there is still hardware being produced that works with Linux I’m buying it, if no hardware exists I’m gonna keep using my old hardware until new hardware that does support Linux comes out.
The only thing that’s gonna be replaced is capitalism and by extension the capitalist class.
Oh, it seems that in the future books will become popular.
