37 points by mikece 3 days ago | 43 comments on HN
| Mild positive Mixed · v3.7· 2026-03-01 07:19:00 0
Summary Digital Access & Privacy Neglects
This page is a technology news article reporting on Microsoft's announcement of new mini PCs for Windows 365. The content shows mild positive engagement with information sharing and cultural participation but exhibits structural negatives in privacy and accessibility. Overall, the page neglects human rights considerations, prioritizing commercial content delivery over rights-protective design.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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"
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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