Re:Crazy New Ideas
by chrisco255 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:43AM
(#27063995)
How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace.
I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.
Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.
Re:Crazy New Ideas
by chrisco255 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:12PM
(#27065409)
I think the situation is bad because developers are expensive, and really expert devs that know how to optimize app performance are even more expensive. You mention Notion and Slack and other Electron apps. Not to disparage the teams on these projects as they are impressive from a pure UX perspective. But building these complex apps cross-platform native is particularly difficult today. So Electron is used as a shortcut. The usage of Electron allowed Slack and Notion to grow rapidly with a smaller team than they otherwise would were they to try to replicate in Windows, Linux and Mac as well as web... not to mention mobile. And once an app is established and has tons of features, as they both do, doing a rewrite is both expensive and risky. Big rewrites almost always fail, and they divide your precious dev resources even more.
You can probably buy them a VDI desktop for $20 per month (Amazon Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure are in this ballpark) and run Chrome on that. Especially with WVD, there are thin clients made specifically for it (or you can just use an RDP client on any OS).
Re:Crazy New Ideas
by username90 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:43AM
(#27064976)
Can't you buy a decent desktop and have them chromote into it? A desktop should be more than enough to run the apps of many people.
Edit: Although, I'm not sure it supports multiple separate logins.
Re:Crazy New Ideas
by tsimionescu on Thursday May 06, 2021 @12:18PM
(#27065498)
Well, if the Lenovo or Apple M1 were 3.5 to 5 times cheaper, they'd also be a good deal, right? In fact, they'd be a better deal than a 5 times cheaper Mighty, I would wager.
Re:Crazy New Ideas
by stephc_int13 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:00AM
(#27064238)
Then you'll simply have to wait a few months.
They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.
The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.
If that were the case you’d expect them to reply to the several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has sent over the last year+.
Re:Crazy New Ideas
by stephc_int13 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:39AM
(#27064909)
Maybe the tech was not yet ready?
Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon Valley.
At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front.
These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.
One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x).
I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds.
At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.
IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.