The 1970s called, they want their 3270 terminals back.
It's worth remember what the P in PC stood for. Personal. A computer that was yours to do with as you wished. Not a machine that is yours only as long as you pay rent to IBM (then) or Microsoft (now). It would be a tragedy to lose the P.
> its design, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apple Mac Mini.
I followed the link and they look nothing alike, unless this is the first time the author is seeing a mini pc. Otherwise it looks like a, surprise, mini pc.
For those of us in "enterprise" work farms, thin clients never really left. Citrix and related technologies are still massively used within any enterprise that has offshore/outsourced IT and software dev teams. It is still the most cost-optimal way to provide IT environments to vendor/non-FTE resources, and this is not going away any time soon. These devices can be incredibly convenient, it takes away the multiple man-years of effort involved in rolling out remote-access solutions.
This comment seemed odd so I went looking for the Apple III fan story. Then things got more strange: the Wikipedia article is full of talk about things melting because there's no fan. However, read all the supposed references and nothing appears about overheating or missing fans. Based on the references Apple III initially had reliability issues due to socketed devices (a known bad idea) and use of substandard PCB manufacturing processes.
The fan thing made me scratch my head initially because 8-bit micros pretty much never had fans. Cooling only became an issue generally speaking in the 32-bit generation, some 10 years later.
There are lots of other fanless thin clients already, and they work fine. I have some that work fine as local machines too after I upgraded RAM and storage.
So it's a way to lock users into the MS cloud ecosystem even more than normal Windows... How nice.
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