Are thin clients a meme?

Are thin clients a meme?

With the general decrease in hardware cost, I don't see the point of these anymore.

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There is no point for most consumers, they're not meant for that.

They're meant for schools and offices where they just need a small footprint computer for basic use.


They're still very much a successful niche of the industry and I don't see them going anywhere in the short term.

AWS has some serious economies of scale, and they have a market where people can put "work" apps on the market and you can purchace a license for them, then run them on all your remote instances. If you reserve an instance in advance, it may be a lot cheaper to put your employees on AWS, plus they can RDP in from home very easily.

An alternative, if you're looking to lower costs, is one pc with three video cards, drive four monitors with a bigass usb switch for keyboards/mice, use any of the programs available on the internet to set up four different seats and route the usb ports by usb hardware id. One computer + 3 shitty graphics cards with no 3d acceleration is much cheaper than 4 computers

had one of these hp pieces of absolute shit literally catch fire on me

My school has those

Pre-builts? Absolutely but custom raven ridge + m.2 SSD ones are perfect little HTPCs.

I'd argue Raven Ridge isn't the best option, mainly because AMD driver support for APUs isn't unified with their main drivers and instead only get 4 WHQL releases a year.

I believe the Raven ridge platform still hasn't received the proper drivers for Netflix 4k support because of this, though that should show up sometime this month or next. Still, disappointing to see.

Intel would still be my recommendation for the average person, AMD isn't bad if you know what you're getting into, but Intel just werks.

>With the general decrease in hardware cost

what is GPU, RAM, SSD

yes they are. I worked at a hospital where they had those for 3 years before they went back to desktops because server for them was always fucking up and they had enough. (might've just been them being shit)

Intel has poor thermals especially because of their larabee frankenstines iGPUs. Driver support is better like you said though. Shame, raven ridge didn't live up to all the hype, we didn't even get quad-channel ram support like initially speculated.

Pretty much everywhere I go that has a secretary or some public servant that doesn't want to do their fucking job and give you the forms has one of those.
They are basically microsoft office and adobe acrobat machines.

If you bother to look further than 3 or 4 years back you will see that computers were a lot more expensive back in the day. For example, 10+ years ago there was no way in hell you could buy a brand new laptop for $200. Even a shitty one.

>I don't see the point of these anymore.

Have you ever worked? I see those all the time at offices, schools and courts.

These are a crappy idea, but of course they get offered to companies and government.

Then companies and government decide they can save all that IT trouble by just having that one remote, easy to administrate server and some SaaS stuff and buy them.

It almost never works out to be a good idea because they'll tend to be slow and incur ongoing costs even if they don't have other issues.

Having full low-end machines that aren't really "optimized" to be a client is just easier, even if you put the document storage on network shares on a central NAS/server or storage cloud or whatever the fuck you do.

Sure, but the average person doesn't give a fuck about the thermals on an HTPC.

You're not using it for production, you're using it to play movies.

At least intel drivers support 4k playback from netflix. Which seems like a pretty essential "feature" when talking about an HTPC in 2018.

These are the places that likely systematically got called by marketing teams.

So what? They still sell well and they serve their intended function.

They're not meant to be workstation replacements.

tru

>spending $150 - $400 on a thin client
>not just using a $40 raspberry pi

Painfully stupid.

>meme
not even close, it's my new netbook

>get an i3 nuc
>does whatever a desktop can do
>plays even 10 bit 4k video
>converts, renders, gets work done easily
>none of which a memeberry can handle

mine had brix