| History truly does repeat itself. Shall we go over the shortcomings and problems with thin clients again? Network problems mean you are screwed.
Even short of full on connectivity loss, if you're suffering congestion or packet loss for whatever reason, a thin client can quickly become unusable. Right now I work remotely a lot, from accessing remote git repositories to doing work on c9.io (which I love.) But if I do suffer network problems, I can work locally. It's not a full on loss of productivity. Yes network ubiquity, reliability and speed has never been better than it is today. But it is not 100%. Especially if you live in a rural area like I do. Datacenter problems mean you're screwed.
Datacenter suffer outages too. Even AWS. Again, with a traditional client you can cope with it. With a thin client you are totally hosed. As with network issues, there are lots of datacenter problems that aren't full on outages. Hardware and otherwise. Even Thin Clients suffer obsolescence.
One of the tried and true dreams of thin clients is that they don't go obsolete. Anyone who has been on this rodeo before knows that's just not true. Network connectivity gets better, display connectivity gets better, power usage improves, etc. And with today's desktop and laptop speeds improving at the snail pace they do, a thin client really isn't offering any bonus here. If you buy a good laptop or desktop today it's going to last you years and years. (The MacBook I'm typing on now is 4 years old and showing no signs of age.) It is slower.
Despite this raving endorsement (totally unbiased I'm sure.) Thin clients that have to reach out across the network for every action are always going to be slower than a machine that doesn't. The network is always adding latency. Whether that bothers you or not largely depends on your own tolerances and what you are doing. There's a reason thin clients always make a comeback and people are excited for a while and then realize "Oh wait I want a traditional machine again please." This cycle has happened so many times. |