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.
At the same time I’m seeing a bunch of ads for “hardware is getting too expensive, use Akamai cloud for your gaming etc instead, now with AI blah blah!”
Bitch, you’re the reason hardware is so expensive!
Create the problem, then offer an over-priced ‘solution’
Since the ubiquity of smartphones, PC relevancy has been on the decline, and now with the pricing out of regular people, I imagine they will eventually become a completely niche and rare thing, to the point where even renting them out won’t be common or necessary. What’s more concerning to me is where the internet is going. In a few decades I think it will be mainly used for banking, medical an other administrative things, with the social aspect heavily regulated and monitored, and will only be used by businesses. We’ve lived through a very unique time, and things are bound to change massively, so enjoy it while you can.
Step 1: Raise sales prices artificially
Step 2: Create affordable alternatives to rent.
Step 3: Wait until enough people claim that its cheaper and more comfortable to just rent.
Step 4: Wait until maket is destroyed.
Step 6: Raise prices.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy”
- Blackstone
Blackstone* They’re the ones doing this to the single family home market. They get far less attention than BlackRock, but pull far shadier shit.
Corrected.
There is no cloud, just someone else computer.
I’m sure he celebrates the soaring cost of DIMMs as they drive PC prices out of reach.
Terry Davis was right…
Edit: For anyone that don’t know : https://youtu.be/3HD43lvNvCA?t=2084 He was mentally unwell but he called it !
Cloud is just a fancy word for giving up your freedoms. You rely on some greedy corporation and for what? What would the benefit even be?
I quite like that I can access my D&D character sheets or my CV through iCloud. I like that if my phone suddenly exploded my stuff is backed-up. I like that Steam has cloud saves on top of local ones. That is about where it ends, though. The idea of renting a computer, especially from these goons, is completely ridiculous and I hope people don’t validate it just so they can play expensive games(cheaper games needing less intense hardware exist and are often really, really good).
So, there are clear benefits but you’re right that after a point it’s just not worth it. I’d rather fuck around with emailing myself copies of things than let the entire tech world take over our lives like this.
Everything a subscription. You’ll own nothing and like it!
And, people, I can’t stress this enough, FUCK JEFF BEZOS!
Though this is all motivated by capitalistic expansion, it’s also worth noting that liberals have been trying to eliminate the dissent facilitated through online activism and information campaigns for a few years now. Ownership over our PCs means that there can always be an internet operated and monitored by us.
edit: Pretty sure some of you don’t know what liberalism is.
I can’t believe we in a place where that needs to be said.
You gotta pay more attention then. Many of us have expected this for nine years, some sixty 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…
This is stupid. I will never rent a computer mainframe.
Well chucklefuck you need a basic PC to act as the client. You know what kind of computer most people have? A shitty PC good enough to be the fuckin client. Why would they want to pay for a shitty pc to rent another one when they can just use the fucking shitty PC they bought at walmart for 300 for 8 fuckin years like they do now? That is $3 a month amortized beat that bitch.
They will sell it like streaming services or printers and ink. The first Amazon PC is free, then the subscription price and amount of ads go up. Eventually people will stick because all their files are there, and their Amazon PC does not support mass storage devices like USB sticks to download all of their work.
It can’t be free because it costs too much. You need data centers near customers for acceptable latency. You also need a computer to connect to your amazon PC.
No your phone won’t work. To prove this. Get a really expensive phone that you can a keyboard and display to. This is already a thing right. Run a remote desktop software on your actual PC wired vastly preferred. Now go next door and ensure you have acceptable wifi. Try this out and tell me how it works for you.
Now imagine it with average wifi which is often terrible in my households with the shitty phones people have creating an experience that is orders of magnitude best case scenario we have created above.
The first Amazon PC is free
Whoa lets not go too far off the crazy cliff now.
I think they’re saying, in a literal sense but still, something like “the first hit is free”. These companies have made us all poor enough to be easily attracted to these “deals” and once we have no choice they screw us directly.
Walmart had that as their whole thing, maybe still do. Go into a town and undercut the fuck out of their local businesses, using other Walmart locations as welfare providers, and then jacking up prices once the competition has been obliterated and no one has the capital to bring them back because half the town works at the big box store that doesn’t pay them fuck-all.
You would actually need server racks at major ISPs colocated near customers (like netflix does now) to have acceptable latency. To have acceptable performance you would need a cheap small form factor PC, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse.
None of this is free and if not fucked up on the software side would perform fine as far as normal computing tasks by itself.
Look how much a Chromebook costs. Amazon can afford to sell them at a loss now, if they can charge you $20/month later or so, stuff ads into everything or bundle it with other Amazon services to make it appear like a good deal. The question is not “how much can we make on this hardware”, but "how much can we get from the customer over 5 years.
Cheap computer (I’m Canadian so let’s say these are maple bucks) say $500, what’s a rental $30 a month, so 16ish months before it’s paid off.
I ran a media PC off a $300 computer for years (I can’t recall exactly least 2 maybe 3). If you need more you probably don’t need a cloud one, if you get a cloud one it’s cheaper to buy a cheap computer every 2 years.
It may make a sense to some but I enjoy having my nas backup and separate media PC. Also if Amazon goes down you can’t even access the calculator, least with no Internet there are options at home.
Imagine the unparalleled censorship when the far-right tech elites decide what you can do on “your” computer.
One way or another, major company-backed OSes are moving towards that. Checking all your pictures, messages, videos, audio, for your own good. For now it’s creeping on mobile, but don’t worry, it’ll come to a windows near you soon enough.
Good thing you can uninstall Windows for now, then.
Also, I have a feeling that Bezos’ threats to kill the PC (yes, I’m calling them threats because they sound like threats), and the KYC stuff going around are somehow linked.
Bezos’ threats against the very existence of the PC could also be construed as a threat against self-hosting, including the Fediverse, and against the existence of alt OSes as well.
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
