Bezos's Vision of Rented Cloud PCs Looks Less Far-Fetched (windowscentral.com) 154
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once told an audience that he views local PC hardware the same way he views a 100-year-old electric generator he saw in a brewery museum -- as a relic of a pre-grid era, destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own. The anecdote, shared at a talk a few years ago, positioned Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as the inevitable successors to the desktop tower. Bezos argued that users would eventually abandon local computing for cloud-based solutions, much as businesses once abandoned on-site power generation for the electrical grid.
Current market dynamics have made that prediction feel more plausible. DRAM prices have become increasingly untenable for consumers, and companies like Dell and ASUS have signaled price increases across their PC ranges. Micron has shut down its consumer DRAM operations entirely, prioritizing AI datacenter demand instead. SSD storage is expected to face similar constraints. Cloud gaming services from Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce Now and Xbox are seeing steady growth.
Microsoft previously developed a consumer version of its business-grade Windows 365 cloud PC product, though the company deprioritized it -- the economics didn't work when cheap laptops remained available. That calculus could shift. Xbox Game Pass's 1440p cloud gaming runs $30 monthly and NVIDIA recently imposed a 100-hour cap on its cloud platform. The infrastructure remains expensive to operate, but rising local hardware costs may eventually close that gap.
Current market dynamics have made that prediction feel more plausible. DRAM prices have become increasingly untenable for consumers, and companies like Dell and ASUS have signaled price increases across their PC ranges. Micron has shut down its consumer DRAM operations entirely, prioritizing AI datacenter demand instead. SSD storage is expected to face similar constraints. Cloud gaming services from Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce Now and Xbox are seeing steady growth.
Microsoft previously developed a consumer version of its business-grade Windows 365 cloud PC product, though the company deprioritized it -- the economics didn't work when cheap laptops remained available. That calculus could shift. Xbox Game Pass's 1440p cloud gaming runs $30 monthly and NVIDIA recently imposed a 100-hour cap on its cloud platform. The infrastructure remains expensive to operate, but rising local hardware costs may eventually close that gap.
Visions of a privacy nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own
It's clear Bozo's vision is that he gets to look at what every body does on "their computer", and nothing to do with what actual ownership might become.
Re:Visions of a privacy nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
And the ultimate Rent income stream.
A lot of non-techy folks would likely jump at this, especially if it's part of some 'connectivity bundle' that comes with a thin client screen and keyboard, phone service, and streaming service.
How long before folks rolling their own are looked at sideways by LE?
Re: (Score:2)
How long before folks rolling their own are looked at sideways by LE?
We're nearly there. I imagine the suspicion I would be under explaining to some goon that, no, I do not have any social media history to share because I do not have any social media accounts. To answer your question: we're this close.
Re: (Score:2)
We are... but people are not exactly trusting cloud stuff with all the AI slop, which keeps PC sales gong. In fact, I read PC sales outpaced Mac sales this quarter by a larger percentage, which is notable.
Yes, Bezos wants to take away our PCs. We have had many companies want to turn all our stuff into terminals for many decades now, way back to the leased lines for mainframes, JavaStations, XStations, ChromeOS, and many others. They will have some success, but the cost of leasing a VM to play games over
Re: (Score:2)
How long before folks rolling their own are looked at sideways by LE?
Amazon and Microsoft, etc... will be doing that, so I'd start with them.
Re:Visions of a privacy nightmare (Score:5, Informative)
Privacy concerns aside (and they're very real), every time we've looked at any kind of cloud vs locally owned equipment, it has not only cost more, but a lot more, like twice as much, over the life of the equipment.
It's simply a bad deal.
Re: (Score:2)
See also: The cost of people's electric and water bills, and recent increases in unemployment.
The whole "rent a device" idea is being pushed by the same assholes making shit unaffordable in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
It's clear Bozo's vision is that he gets to look at what every body does on "their computer", and nothing to do with what actual ownership might become.
Not only that, but also how they're manipulating supply to make his 'vision' happen:
Re: (Score:2)
Vision of the Future? Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vision of the Future? Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. We have gone back and forth between local computing and remote computing as the preferred way, simply because both ways have strong advantages and strong disadvantages. None is the "one true way" and anybody characterizing one option as such is an idiot or a liar. Hence what is better (local, remote or mix of the two) depends very much on what you do and what your requirements and limitations are.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. We have gone back and forth between local computing and remote computing as the preferred way, simply because both ways have strong advantages and strong disadvantages. None is the "one true way" and anybody characterizing one option as such is an idiot or a liar. Hence what is better (local, remote or mix of the two) depends very much on what you do and what your requirements and limitations are.
You could also frame that as centralized vs distributed computing.
Can vision whatever you want (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Lots of people have visions of things that aren't here. They're called "hallucinations," and it's the one human ability that AI has mastered fully.
Perhaps that joke about Zuck being a robot isn't entirely a joke after all.
Re: (Score:3)
I wouldn't want a dumb box either, but most regular folks are scared of their computers. If they even need one, on the rare occasions that happens, I think they'd be perfectly potty with a dumb box supplied by their ISP. They no longer have to worry about updates, any viruses are the ISP's problem. Most folks do not use a lot of different apps. And right now their phone has already greased this slide.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I call those people future Apple users and that is not derogatory. If non-techie non-gaming people ask me for a new laptop recommendation I just tell them to go spend the money and get a Macbook and they'll be happier than any Dell or HP shitterbox.
Re: (Score:2)
A non-trivial percentage of Apple users are choosing the platform because it's good for music production. Cloud-based computing won't work for that, because of latency.
Re: Can vision whatever you want (Score:3)
Ios is way more restrictive than chrome os. So is the hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
It is not going to happen. The market would need to massively shrink before consumer computer hardware would go away. It would need to shrink massively again before the same would happen for industrial computer hardware. And there are things that will not work with remote computing for a long time, like CAD applications. I talked to some people that tried. The lag was killing their engineers.
Hence, no, the market for PC-type hardware will NOT go away.
High school programming class (Score:2)
The market would need to massively shrink before consumer computer hardware would go away. It would need to shrink massively again before the same would happen for industrial computer hardware.
Between the first and second shrinks, on what machine would high school students taking a programming class do their coursework?
Re: (Score:2)
The first shrink will not happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If things get really bad, people will buy Raspberry Pi-tier machines. This might even get gaming companies to actually figure out how to slim things down, because there will be developers (likely the generation after the COBOL programmers) who can bust out a game in 64k of x86 assembly code and have it be something worth playing.
Re: (Score:2)
If your load is not completely flat all day, i.e. it's a real load, do you provision for peak load and let the excess sit idle all day or do you accept instantaneous throughput constraints?
I provision for a heterogeneous load (Score:2)
I provision my development workstations for a heterogeneous load. When a task is constrained by throughput of one resource, such as compiling a large program using a lot of CPU, I temporarily switch to another task that uses a different resource. This could be system library updates (which are network and disk bound), updating doc comments of the code that I wrote (which is thought bound), or reading documentation (which is network and thought bound).
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This was my thought. What do the 'terminals' to these 'rented computers' look like?
How much 'local processing' do they need to do the communication and display? Wouldn't they still need RAM and hardware of some sort?
Re: (Score:2)
Thin clients (Score:2)
This was my thought. What do the 'terminals' to these 'rented computers' look like?
Thin clients have been around at least since X terminals in the early 1990s [wikipedia.org].
How much 'local processing' do they need to do the communication and display? Wouldn't they still need RAM and hardware of some sort?
One could do a useful thin client that "just" runs X, VNC, or RDP on 256 MB of RAM and a cheap ARM processor. This isn't enough for (say) a development workstation unless you're using tools made for RAM capacities typical of 2003, which means no Visual Studio Code with LSP-driven tooltips.
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine it would be a monitor with network capabilities that you can plug a mouse and keyboard into, that's it. Everything is streamed. Nothing is processed locally. Just a dumb monitor that doesn't do anything unless it's connected to their service.
Re: (Score:2)
More processing power than the fastest computers in the world in the year 2000.
Re: (Score:2)
This was my thought. What do the 'terminals' to these 'rented computers' look like?
Historically a thin-client [wikipedia.org] (which are still a thing), and more recently probably something like a Chromebook [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll just move to a phone that can be attached to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and use the phone as a desktop PC with whatever comes after Samsung DEX.
You'll own nothing and be happy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Rollo kind of started this off in the early 900s - it became what we call feudalism
Everything old is new again.
Adam Something over on YouTube just did a GREAT explainer on the new Digital Feudalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Dummy Terminal (Score:4, Insightful)
They can pry my RTX 5070 from my cold dead hands....
Fuck dummy terminals. This idea has been pushed by corporate elites for decades...
I don't agree (Score:5, Insightful)
You still need hardware to access cloud resources. May as well make that hardware capable in its own right--it's not expensive, especially if you don't care about gaming.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even for commercial users, VDIs are insanely expensive, be it cloud, or using VMWare (or whatever it is now) Horizon. There was a product called vWorkspace which was awesome back in the day, but Dell bought the company and killed it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In their world, networks never go down and it's 100% uptime for everything, all the time. They also commute to work riding over the rainbow on a unicorn.
Not to mention that in their world, consumers will have enough bandwidth to upload a quarter terabyte video file in less than a day, which I definitely do not.
Capitalism is dead (Score:3)
The idea of ownership is disappearing in this country.
Just like electricity... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't "rent" electricity, I pay for someone else to generate it and then I own what I've consumed. It does not get returned to the company and there are no restrictions on how I use it.
I'm gonna have to say that's how I want my computer, too. I might delegate certain tasks but I'm never buying into this subscription based cloud computer crap.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You might not "rent" electricity (actually, electricity capacity) if you can accept that your instantaneous demand may not be met. If you have peaks that have to be met, you actually do rent the electrical capacity.
Analogies are descriptive, not prescriptive. Adding constraints merely to break the analogy doesn't disprove the analogy, especially if they also break the analog.
Don't be so sure. (Score:2)
Since the invention of the computer user, it has only been a matter of time before someone managed to find a way to make the drug dealer model applicable and we're most of the way there.
I might delegate certain tasks but I'm never buying into this subscription based cloud computer crap.
For the most part, a lot of people are most of the way there. Specifically, they will use an online office suite which keeps most of their data offsite. I had a friend who, through a series of poor choices, managed to lose access to his google account (and several years of data) after switching phone numbers. As he described
Re: (Score:2)
I don't "rent" electricity, I pay for someone else to generate it and then I own what I've consumed. It does not get returned to the company ...
You better, otherwise the electrons won't move and you won't get any power out if it.
...and there are no restrictions on how I use it.
Sure there is. Maybe not you personally because your usage is so small that it is basically a rounding error to the utility, but commercial users are subject to power factor constraints and time of use constraints. It's a shared, limited resource.
Mainframe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bezos sells remote computing. Your mechanic doesn't think he invented oil changes and X point inspections but he sure thinks you need them every three months.
Besos? (Score:3)
XStation, Playbox, I'm not switching (Score:2)
If the work version is called an XStation, is the gaming version called a Playbox? The marketing departments of Sony and Microsoft might have something to say about that.
Going for gold... (Score:3)
...in the olympics of bad ideas
One man's vision is another man's nightmare. (Score:5, Insightful)
So the "vision" is that the ultra-rich own all the computers and everyone else gets to rent them. Sounds like the vision for real estate: The ultra-rich will own all the properties and we will all get to rent them. And food: The ultra-rich will own all the farmland and we get to buy the food from them.
What this really is, is the WEF vision of "You will own nothing and you will be happy". There will be no middle-class allowed to own property: Just the ultra-rich owning everything and the rest of us will be a "working class" only allowed to work to survive.
This is just "Neo-feudalism". A few ultra-rich and a serf class.
Time to break out the guillotines, friends.
Re: (Score:2)
Lord Technotwat says... (Score:3)
People love this idea. Look at automobiles. Everyone uses public transportation now because nobody wants to own the things important to them.
Re: (Score:2)
People love this idea. Look at automobiles. Everyone uses public transportation now because nobody wants to own the things important to them.
It's certainly what the Übers of the world want. Personally, I think robotaxis are backwards. Having cars drive themselves is great, but the removal of personal ownership implied by robotaxis is a mistake.
The theory is that by renting what you need for only the hours that you need it, you'll pay less, because you won't have to build one for every person. The flaw in that theory is that by building fewer, the cost per unit skyrockets, so you'll end up paying not that much less for significantly reduc
Are we to bow to the problem billionare AI caused? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where have we seen that before? (Score:4, Insightful)
Closer than you think (Score:4, Interesting)
I see all the 'not a chance' responses, but I'd argue that the current Chromebook ecosystem comes pretty close to this: the majority of Chromebook hardware is designed to run a centrally-managed OS platform that enables access to larger services--just like a typical thin client; and the data and applications it runs are already 'rented' from Google using ad revenue & Google app subscriptions.
If Google added remote-hosting services for apps that can't run locally (and resurrected Stadia under a new name cause that's what Google does best), I think it would fulfill this 'vision' in all the meaningful ways...
Re: (Score:2)
Is the difference between this new idea and a Chromebook just a middle-ware layer where the processing/rendering takes place? So instead of interacting with a browser, I interact with a picture of a browser and the 'computer' that generated that picture interacts with the actual webpage?
Is there a way to 'rearchitect' everything to not need a dedicated 'middle-ware' layer, but instead your 'display terminal' receives feeds of pre-computed and pre-rendered webpages and applications from multiple sources?
Ar
Re: (Score:2)
The modern web is rendered locally on the end user's device. Hence all of the JS and exploitation thereof. See also the industry's extreme focus on data caps and bandwidth usage, and why end users are able to use effective AD blockers in the first place. Rearchitecting all of that to be server side would upend many business models. (And funnily enough, remove the n
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah and I won't buy one of them either.
Re: (Score:2)
Chromebooks do pretty much all of their computing locally on capable hardware. It's not the same thing at all.
And in the olden days (Score:2)
Was the mainframe. And when the computer was down, your business was down. But computers were expensive, and not every business needed a full computer, so the time sharing companies became a thing, and when their computer was down, your business was down. Everyone had a bad time, so as soon as personal computers became a thing, they became a thing. And the internet happened, and they forget the lessons of the old days and then reinvented it a piece at a time. So we now have the time sharing services that br
Not this again (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Grid analogy not as great for consumer-level (Score:3)
I think we've long hit the point of computing as service for commercial computing. Businesses need the flexibility to scale processing and storage capacities pretty widely, and they also don't want to deal with staffing for maintenance of physical computing system.
But for consumers, the "power grid" analogy doesn't hold up as well. A commercial user who needs to store a bunch of data or do a bunch of number crunching does need terminals proportional to those needs. You can manage petabytes of storage with one terminal same as gigabytes. But consumer computing generally needs a terminal for each task. That terminal itself needs some amount of computing power anyways even if the heavy lifting is offloaded, and most consumer tasks don't really need much more computing power than would take to power the terminal in the first place. There's no physical reason you need cloud based computing to run a word processor or web browser. The only exception is really gaming and maybe some prosumer things like higher-end video editing/3d modeling, etc. Even then, the only reason why the server-based computing looks good in comparison to owning your own RTX5090 is that the data centers themselves are driving prices up (same for RAM). Unlike commercial computing, home users don't have to worry about operating costs- the marginal electricity savings of outsourcing your video card are pretty trivial.
The real reason why Amazon (as well as the rest of the tech ecosystem) wants to foist this on home users is that they much prefer revenue streams to single purchases, with the added benefit of another datamine.
Re: (Score:2)
There's no physical reason you need cloud based computing to run a word processor
When you use the phrase "run a word processor", you are implying using a PC in the way it was used when it was invented. There was no internet back then, and you had just one computing device which had your applications and files.
Now consider that you use several devices, laptops, smartphones, etc. You edit a document on your laptop, and you want to display it on your smartphone, when you don't have your laptop with you. Pretty soon you will ask your AI secretary to show you the file that your wrote abou
Re: (Score:2)
While they have been pushing cloud storage hard, there's no reason why it should be mandatory. It can (and should) be optional. It may sound convenient for access to files to be hardware agnostic, but there are also significant cost and security reasons to keep them local. Most home end-users don't have a pressing need for cross-platform access to documents, and if they do, they can add them to the cloud selectively rather than natively.
A web browser is indeed a terminal to other computers, but that's the p
Not a valid comparison (Score:2)
Big Difference (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"new generation of E-waste"
Fixed that for you.
You will own nothing (Score:2)
- Klaus Schawb (WEF)
You won't own your computer, you won't own your data. You will own nothing.
Time to stock up on computer hardware if you want to continue to OWN your own stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, let's all just join in the surveillance state (Score:2)
Because we need Bezos et. al. to be looking over our shoulders at all times.
Only because we're being forced to (Score:2)
Bezos argued that users would eventually abandon local computing for cloud-based solutions ...
Users aren't "abandoning" local computing, and as far as I can tell most have no interest in doing that. They're being FORCED away from local computing: witness the dystopian hellscape which Windows has become, as well as Adobe's push toward cloud-based rentware.
The broligarchs won't rest until every single daily activity of the average citizen is spied upon, recorded, controlled, and monetized. They regard us as chattels - we are to them as livestock are to humans in general. Saying that we're "abandoning"
Back to the thin client terminals (Score:2)
What is old becomes new again...
Doesn't matter if mainframes are dead; it's still a remote server and a thin client with central control.
Jeff Bezos can bite my shiny metal ass (Score:2)
I will not be renting my PC from Amazon or anyone else. I do not care how much it costs.
I see (Score:2)
Guess, whom I view as a giant dick peeking out of a polo shirt...
I view Jeff Bezos the way I view rich people (Score:2)
As the scum of the earth.
ughh (Score:2)
They have been saying that since the 1990's. We've constantly been told that personal hardware would be pointless and everything is going back to old school server-workstation architecture, and it still hasn't happened.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on slashdot... (Score:2)
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
ALL HAIL MULTIVAC (Score:2)
This is a vision of the future from the 1950s. If you want to credit someone, credit Asimov.
Hard Pass (Score:2)
For the same reason that even though one could rent a condo or apartment and have all of your maintenance cared for, some people do in fact like to own things. If not just for the sake of something potentially increasing in value. But because when you own something,
Cue the Blade Runner soundtrack (Score:2)
Ugh... (Score:2)
The RAM prices are a relatively short term effect of lots of investment being thrown an an unprepared supply chain. This is not a durable 'end-user computing is from now on going to get more expensive', it's an anomaly of a trend of cheaper and cheaper bang for your buck. Crash or continue, either way the AI craze buildout will decrease (either they will have built out and settle into a milder 'refresh' cycle, or crash out and obviously not be buying).
Re: (Score:2)
RAM prices have gone up to about what they were in 2019, they affect cloud providers just as much as they affect you, and yeah, they're temporary.
But we have to have this freakout about RAM every few years when the price briefly goes up instead of down.
Mainframes! (Score:2)
You're Soaking In It (Score:2)
We've already see the model with the dawn of the smartphone. Everyone buys more and more cores with more and more storage and RAM to run the same apps they did ten years ago, some of it just to show your friends MyPhoneVersion = YourPhoneVersion + 1. And yet that more powerful hardware you keep upgrading isn't worth much for standalone uses. WiFi-only connectivity doesn't count because it's the same rechargeable 5% brick (I'm excluding standalone camera functions, for now, with 5%) without cloud services.
Be
Your joke here? (Score:2)
Disappointed there ain't no Funny. But as usual.
I can't imagine (Score:2)
have a monthly subscription for a PC and all the apps that run on it. Consumers are stupid enough to go for this.
It's barely a conspiracy theory (Score:2)
. . . when they say it out loud.
I think there's a real growing concern, I last heard Gamer's Nexus on YouTube make this point really well, that the real appeal of AI to VC and Big Tech, is exactly this. They can squeeze the PC market for a few years until the cloud computing end game is finally realized, and everything is a service. It's not just Bezos and DRAM. Nvidia really wants to route consumer GPUs not to consumers, but go GeForce Now subscriptions.
Owning a PC could very well be a protest statement so
Satellite latency and data caps (Score:2)
It's because (a) the internet has become fast enough that there's no penalty for a cloud-based solution
In the city, maybe. In rural areas outside the service area of cable and fiber, the penalty is nearly a second of speed-of-light latency to and from the geostationary satellite and the data transfer overage bill from the ISP at the end of the month. Likewise for work done on a laptop while riding public transportation to or from home: if it isn't completely local, you incur a mobile hotspot/"tethering" bill from your cellular ISP.
Re: (Score:2)
If those alternatives don't exist? People start making them. If people are blocked from making them? The guillotines come out.
TL;DR: Subscriptions only work as a business model when there are viable options to them. Their selling point is convenience, but they suck at selli
Re: (Score:2)