Comment by resfirestar
25 days ago
Seems like this article misses the enterprise angle which is the main question. I'm sure some gamers aching for an upgrade will sign up for cloud PCs while RAM is overpriced, just like how Geforce Now had a moment while GPUs were overpriced. But does it make any sense for businesses with massive fleets of Windows laptops, and might already have some kind of VDI setup, to replace them with thin clients? Would need some significant progress on the hardware.
I'm not really a big gamer but was looking into buying an xbox again. I already had a controller and thought why not try xbox cloud gaming on my Samsung TV.
With a decent internet connection I now struggle to see why anyone would want to buy a hardware Xbox. Games on the cloud version load instantly, play brilliantly and cost the same as the usual Game Pass as far as I can tell. The catalogue seems smaller maybe but aside from that I see little downside.
I could see it working well for PCs too - as long as the terminal device is seamless. I guess us devs have been renting computers in "the cloud" for decades anyway.
> I could see it working well for PCs too
I moonlight in film restoration. One 2hr movie out of our scanner is easily 16 TiB or more depending on the settings we scanned with.
Getting this uploaded to a remote server would take ~39hr over a fully-saturated 1Gbe pipe.
Clearly one use case where it wouldn't work.
On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already.
If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has.
Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.
Sure, why not? A lot of them are already heavily invested in ms services. Where I work, laptops are on three year leases, they’d be easy to switch if the IT suits thought it would be cheap enough.
I'd say you are wrong on gamers aching for this. Any amount of latency ruins games, even turn based games lose a lot of their enjoyment when the ui starts getting delayed from user input.