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by breakfastduck 1794 days ago
I think the key difference is yours and mine concept of 'underpowered'.

Their cheapest seat has 5gb ram. If I had a laptop with 8gb RAM I would consider it under powered.

If I had 4gb, as low as tolerable, why would I pay a premium for 1gb extra with a likely probably throttled CPU.
2 comments
dividedbyzero 1793 days ago
It's not so much about raw specs for me, but how I can utilize what I have. I use a GCP instance that usually is set to a bit weaker specs than my laptop (I can resize it pretty quickly, so that's not always true), but I can run it at 100% utilization for hours, use all of its RAM without worrying about browser tabs swapping, use TBs of storage, yet my own device stays nice and cool and battery doesn't get drained as fast. It's not about what I can torture my laptop hardware into delivering, but what it can handle easily, and what I do could be done completely locally on a beefier laptop (it's not that resource-intensive), but I'd rather not have anything bulkier than a 13" Macbook (and would rather downgrade to something even more nimble) than upgrade – maybe a 12" M1 fanless?)

So I guess this may be aimed at a similar niche – laptop not enough to run everything well, but the most important things, and use such a service for the occasional peek into a CAD file or the like. Pricing would still turn me off, but I'm certainly not their target audience.

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igniteram 1794 days ago
In a single instance of 4GB RAM and 2vCPU only one app is running as opposed to entire desktop applications running on usual 8GB machines. We are not saying the platform will and should replace your desktops or laptops, infact we feel both will co-exist together. Users could do activities specific to cloud apps like - use the browsers as VPN, leisure activities, testing their weekend fun projects, conducting interviews on the dev tools they use in their companies etc.
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