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The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With

The idea of a super thin client in the form of a light laptop with amazing battery life connected to something like this seemed appealing a few years ago. With everything Apple has delivered with their ARM processors though it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too with compute power, battery life, and a very nice laptop all at once.

nashashmi 3y ago
All without internet connectivity.
thegrim33 3y ago
Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would companies and governments not want all that extra data and control.
- riskable 3y ago
  When AI gets involved it suddenly starts making sense because your laptop's GPU a little baby toy compared to an entire data center running the latest & greatest GPU/AI accelerators. It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
  - crowcroft 3y ago
    My sense is that AI models will need to be able to run on relatively low powered eventually, just purely for the economics of it to work out. Still a lot of unknowns though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- leobg 3y ago
  Was that not precisely @Suhail’s business plan? I hear they have since pivoted to AI image gen.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Fair enough, but most people are far far past that. Email, photos, notes, relationships, documents, professional work...every part of their life is already in the cloud.
- vb6sp6 3y ago
  [dead]
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  Exactly. The naivete of people is astounding. We hear every day about people being deplatformed for no reason at all, and the price they pay for using said platforms.
- 3seashells 3y ago
  Can also imagine the data syphoning on standardized containers be coming a grade a attack vector on other containers.
LegitShady 3y ago
In a recent sale, I saw a 15" macbook air for $1750 Canadian Dollarydoos (a discount of $250 from the original price of $2000). For t hat money it came with an M2 chip, 512gb SSD, and 8gb of RAM. There is no alternate timeline of this universe that would make a $1750 or $2000 laptop with 8gb of RAM ok with me in 2023. The prices are high and the upgrade costs for RAM are abusive. Of course, it doesn't use SODIMM modules so you can't upgrade the RAM yourself, you have to buy an even more obscenely priced model from apple. That being said using thin clients with even less control than existing windows or mac computers have sounds terrible too.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  I needed to buy an iMac for my wife's new job, and could only afford the base model iMac M1 24" - 8 GB RAM, small storage, limited Thunderbolt ports, but it's still been the best computer we've ever had, bar none. My wife abused it with huge catalogs built in Adobe InDesign, as well as projects in Illustrator and Photoshop, and the only thing that's held us back is the small storage when Photoshop feels like it doesn't have enough scratch disk. We haven't even noticed the 7 core GPU (vs the 8 core the midrange model gets). Anectdata aside, you know your workflow better than I do so I won't tell you 8 GB should be enough. It definitely makes it less future proofed for sure.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    its not even enough ram to run cities skylines with a decent city. For a premium product in 2023 costing what it does, the ram should not be 8gb.
- crowcroft 3y ago
  Totally agree that the current offering from Apple isn’t exactly appealing for everyone, I would imagine other manufacturers will develop products that offer similar specs soon though.
rcarmo 3y ago
Funnily enough. I live inside Remote Desktop services (have done so for years, and Citrix before that). I have optimized RDP on Linux to some pretty extensive lengths, but I’ve always used iPads as thin clients and this year I decided to use a Mac mini (driving two 5K-ish displays), and the experience is just glorious. Simply glorious, including for video calling (with camera and audio pass-through).

nashashmi 3y ago

All without internet connectivity.

thegrim33 3y ago

Would never be appealing to me in the slightest, having my compute taken away from me and put in someone else's control to siphon away even more data about me, where they have the power to shut my compute off if I violate their TOS, accidentally or not, where I'd lose what little remaining privacy I have left. Of course it'll end up that way in the end eventually, as the enshitification continues; no way would companies and governments not want all that extra data and control.

riskable 3y ago
When AI gets involved it suddenly starts making sense because your laptop's GPU a little baby toy compared to an entire data center running the latest & greatest GPU/AI accelerators. It might be that every day (e.g. regular people) AI use cases don't scale much beyond 64GB of VRAM though in which case it's only a matter of time before laptops have such capabilities.
- crowcroft 3y ago
  My sense is that AI models will need to be able to run on relatively low powered eventually, just purely for the economics of it to work out. Still a lot of unknowns though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leobg 3y ago
Was that not precisely @Suhail’s business plan? I hear they have since pivoted to AI image gen.
paulddraper 3y ago
Fair enough, but most people are far far past that. Email, photos, notes, relationships, documents, professional work...every part of their life is already in the cloud.
vb6sp6 3y ago
[dead]
nathanaldensr 3y ago
Exactly. The naivete of people is astounding. We hear every day about people being deplatformed for no reason at all, and the price they pay for using said platforms.
3seashells 3y ago
Can also imagine the data syphoning on standardized containers be coming a grade a attack vector on other containers.

LegitShady 3y ago

In a recent sale, I saw a 15" macbook air for $1750 Canadian Dollarydoos (a discount of $250 from the original price of $2000). For t hat money it came with an M2 chip, 512gb SSD, and 8gb of RAM. There is no alternate timeline of this universe that would make a $1750 or $2000 laptop with 8gb of RAM ok with me in 2023. The prices are high and the upgrade costs for RAM are abusive. Of course, it doesn't use SODIMM modules so you can't upgrade the RAM yourself, you have to buy an even more obscenely priced model from apple. That being said using thin clients with even less control than existing windows or mac computers have sounds terrible too.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
I needed to buy an iMac for my wife's new job, and could only afford the base model iMac M1 24" - 8 GB RAM, small storage, limited Thunderbolt ports, but it's still been the best computer we've ever had, bar none. My wife abused it with huge catalogs built in Adobe InDesign, as well as projects in Illustrator and Photoshop, and the only thing that's held us back is the small storage when Photoshop feels like it doesn't have enough scratch disk. We haven't even noticed the 7 core GPU (vs the 8 core the midrange model gets). Anectdata aside, you know your workflow better than I do so I won't tell you 8 GB should be enough. It definitely makes it less future proofed for sure.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  its not even enough ram to run cities skylines with a decent city. For a premium product in 2023 costing what it does, the ram should not be 8gb.
crowcroft 3y ago
Totally agree that the current offering from Apple isn’t exactly appealing for everyone, I would imagine other manufacturers will develop products that offer similar specs soon though.

rcarmo 3y ago

Funnily enough. I live inside Remote Desktop services (have done so for years, and Citrix before that). I have optimized RDP on Linux to some pretty extensive lengths, but I’ve always used iPads as thin clients and this year I decided to use a Mac mini (driving two 5K-ish displays), and the experience is just glorious. Simply glorious, including for video calling (with camera and audio pass-through).