Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 days ago
> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud"
Our personal devices are far from thin clients.
4 days ago
> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud"
Our personal devices are far from thin clients.
Depends on the app, and the personal device. Mobile devices are increasingly thin clients. Of course hardware-wise they are fully capable personal computers, but ridiculous software-imposed limitations make that increasingly difficult.
"Thin" can be interpreted as relative, no?
I think it depends on if you see the browser for content or as a runtime environment.
Maybe it depends on the application architecture...? I.e., a compute-heavy WASM SPA at one end vs a server-rendered website.
Or is it an objective measure?
But that is what they are mostly used for.
On phones, most of the compute is used to render media files and games, and make pretty animated UIs.
The text content of a weather app is trivial compared to the UI.
Same with many web pages.
Desktop apps use local compute, but that's more a limitation of latency and network bandwidth than any fundamental need to keep things local.
Security and privacy also matter to some people. But not to most.
Speak for yourself. Many people don't daily-drive anything more advanced than an iPad.
IPads are incredibly advanced. Though I guess you mean they don't use anything that requires more sophistication from the user (or something like that)?
The Ipad is not a thin client, is it?
It is, for the vast majority of users.
Turn off internet on they iPad and see how many apps that people use still work.
4 replies →
I mean, Chromebooks really aren't very far at all from thin clients. But even my monster ROG laptop when it's not gaming is mostly displaying the results of computation that happened elsewhere