Amazon’s $195 thin clients are repurposed Fire TV Cubes
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As someone who uses the Workspaces product. This is so not useful it isn't funny. I'd rather give the people chromebooks with the client on it. And tell a worker. Do all your personal and break time web viewing while not on the Workspace. It cuts down the website attack vector drastically.
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Local police really aren't going to care if some corporation calls them and says that someone stole a $700 laptop.
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That is surprising. Most enterprise level companies put management software on their devices and can disable those devices. That kind of thing can be very difficult or impossible to get around. I would think that Amazon would be doing this.
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my brother works remotely for a call center, and every time he's changed line groups they've sent him a new PC, two new monitors, and all necessary peripherals. They've never once sent him the promised prepaid return label and box to ship the old equipment back, so he literally still has three prior complete work setups in the garage at the moment.
I know one anecdote doesn't make for good data, but I have a hard time believing companies actually care about getting equipment back if his virtual call center doesn't.
If they make him switch to one of these I doubt they'll take the old equipment back.
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Encryption and remote management can disable devices and protect against data theft, but the cost of the device itself cannot be recovered if it never returns home.
The police are never going to actively hunt down anything other than a person or value in the millions. You might get lucky to have the item added to a hot-list for pawn shops and the police to watch out for if said item wanders across someone's desk, but that PC is probably gone for good. Not even close to an insurance deductible either.
Bottom line is that if a useable PC costs <$200 vs &700+, companies stand to lose a lot less money in sunk hardware costs.
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Having been in this position with remote workers, generally the police could not give less of a rat's ass. We would make every effort to recover the PCs, and the vast majority of people were honest about it (and the majority of the rest could be cajoled to be honest), but there were one or two cases where we just had to settle for disabling them remotely.
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Amazon continuing to innovate on the front of making workers lives more miserable
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I suspect that at least some of that number is the fact that reverse logistics is a pain, especially if it's peripheral to your business, rather than to outright theft.
Person is departing rather than onboarding; so there's no hiring manager who cares about them being kitted up and productive on day 1. IT presumably wants the gear back(if only to balance the books and be able to say that the drive was wiped; not necessarily because they think that they can redeploy something with 2/3ds of its warranty gone and maybe some suspicion keyboard stains); but they don't work here anymore and their account is dead; so IT needs to go through HR or legal since they can't just email them anymore. HR and/or Legal presumably care at least in principle; but hassling former employees over hardware that's not in their cost center isn't likely to be the most urgent fire they could be fighting at any given moment. And the former employees themselves may not be resisting the request; just taking the (not unreasonable; given that they can't exactly expense anything anymore) position that they'll send it on its way as soon as the box with the return shipping label arrives; unless it's a cheap return label that requires them to drop it off at the UPS store; in which case maybe they'll get to it next week.
70% seems like a high estimate by someone with an obvious interest in high estimates; but unless you are running a well oiled collection machine getting hardware back from someone who isn't outright looking to do something illegal but is no longer super interested in doing you a favor can involve some reasonably expensive hassle in exchange for a mid-lifecycle boring corporate typing laptop in unknown condition; which isn't really an inspiration to unleash the hounds.
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Many city police departments put very little effort into property crimes unless it involves vehicles, drugs or weapons. If they put a bunch of effort into recovering a $600 laptop, they get nothing in return and the DA will likely plead the case down to a short term probation. Weapons they want to recover to prevent the weapon(s) being used against the police. Vehicles are expensive enough to be worthwhile plus the DA might push to jail the offender. Drugs allow the police to keep a piece of the action via civil or criminal forfeiture of any vehicles or buildings used to traffic the drugs.
Rural sheriffs will often put more effort into property crimes as it doesn't take too many pissed off victims to swing an election for sheriff in a county where the number of people who vote may be less then 1000.
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I have a company laptop I don't use, since I was issued its replacement and finished migrating local files six months ago.
The office is a 90 minute drive, round trip, out of my way. They haven't asked after it. I guess I'll turn it in whenever I resign.
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Has stability improved? A big issue with workspace for me back when they first launched it was random disconnects and failure to reconnect after…on a mac at least. Sometimes we had to even get support involved.
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Right, but they could simply file a civil suit. Hit the thief for the full cost of replacement + attorney fees.
They don’t even have to do it every time, just enough times so the would-be thief knows the employer is serious.
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Did I miss the point at which keyboard-less, screen-less thin clients became useful? I’ve seen this product be marketed for over 20 years, morphing from custom Unix to RDP/Windows to Android based. I’ve never met a single person forced to use one (and they always have to be forced) say it was a good experience.
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I’m guessing 70% of companies couldn’t be bothered with the cost of recycling and want the employee to throw the equipment in the trash.
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Maybe in the early early days where i can't remember. But the last couple of years I never had a problem with stability for the most part. Even though i'm setup on the "Wrong Coast" and the latency is worse then going from the East Coast DC because of distance. Most of the issues i would guess general connection issues with the product. So most of the time there's some huge massive surge in data somewhere causing the problem.
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I imagine someone calculated the cost of retrieving equipment and found out the cost of retrieving was close to the cost of writing it off.
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Cost of doing business. I my situation I buy the cheapest highest resolution laptop computers off Dell. Ends up $300-500. Specs. The screen is all i care about and maybe keyboard layout eg function keys have to be there. If the setup lasts more then a year. I am at break even at cost of making the worker productive.
If an employee leaves or quits. I don't want to deal with asking for the laptop back. If they return it fine. But to get it back. I would have to ship them a box. And pay to ship is somewhere else. That's $50-60 of effort on a $300-500 device. Using AWS Workspaces there should be very little to no information actually on the laptop because it is all done though a client. And i just disable the login.
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Even that might be too much to ask of a machine with 2gb of RAM these days.
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Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this announcement is the relatively aggressive pricing.
I suspect that this is something...open to suggestion...if your purchases are large enough that your rep takes negotiation seriously; but Dell or HP charge slightly silly list prices for their thin clients(even the super low end ones; not the 'thin' ones with full mid-tier laptop specs and PCIe expansion that are still classified as thin clients for...reasons).
At time of writing the cheapest HP in the shop is a $300 T430; on the Dell side the 'thin' Optiplex 3000 starts at $500.
Those options are much more vendor agnostic when it comes to what you can configure them to connect to; so Amazon's connect-to-AWS-only offering isn't directly comparable for many users; but it is at least closer to being priced like it isn't doing the computing locally.
I suspect that this is something...open to suggestion...if your purchases are large enough that your rep takes negotiation seriously; but Dell or HP charge slightly silly list prices for their thin clients(even the super low end ones; not the 'thin' ones with full mid-tier laptop specs and PCIe expansion that are still classified as thin clients for...reasons).
At time of writing the cheapest HP in the shop is a $300 T430; on the Dell side the 'thin' Optiplex 3000 starts at $500.
Those options are much more vendor agnostic when it comes to what you can configure them to connect to; so Amazon's connect-to-AWS-only offering isn't directly comparable for many users; but it is at least closer to being priced like it isn't doing the computing locally.
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This is where I was a few years before I left. No one wanted back the crappy laptop so old that an employee that's already using it needs a new one. You'd never give that to someone else who needed a laptop. So yeah, I still have it.
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Note that it's "up to" that percentage, and they don't say that the laptops are stolen, just "never seen again." This can include broken/defective equipment and ones that reach end-of-life, so are disposed by the employee instead of sent back to the company.
And as some others have noted, sometimes the company decides it's not worthwhile requesting the device get returned, especially if it's cheap/old enough,
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I gave up on Amazon devices years ago. I can't imagine these would be anything other than a year from a landfill anyway. From tablets to video streaming, they all kinda suck really fast.
Why would anyone expect these to enable productivity more than an actual cheap PC?
Why would anyone expect these to enable productivity more than an actual cheap PC?
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I've always wondered what the point is of spending so much money on work laptops and workstations when most of office work is done in the cloud these days.
Workers have unknowingly been on dumb terminals for quite a while.
Workers have unknowingly been on dumb terminals for quite a while.
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My point is that the device would not have any value to someone keeping it. As long as the relationship between the company and employee is not hostile and as long as the company makes it easy to return the equipment why wouldn't they do it in most cases?
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It doesn't really matter to a company if hardware goes missing. First up the purchase was an expense that gives a tax break. Then it's depreciated annually to get tax breaks. When it vanishes it's written off and gets a tax break. Carrying old hardware is an expense.
My company recently took a trailer-load of old hardware to an e-cycler because there was no value in trying to clean and sell the things.
So that 70% number doesn't surprise me. The employees think they're getting a bonus so everyone is happy.
My company recently took a trailer-load of old hardware to an e-cycler because there was no value in trying to clean and sell the things.
So that 70% number doesn't surprise me. The employees think they're getting a bonus so everyone is happy.
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True. Though Acer and Asus both have Chromeboxes with significantly better specs than this Amazon box for under $300. The Chromeboxes would also probably be simpler to deploy/maintain. Easy to connect them to Windows RAS, using products like Parallels Client (née 2X) as well.
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Not theft.
Logistics.
You've fired and let go of the employee, so, not your employee. They don't have to lift a finger for you. Are you going to put them on payroll for the time it takes them to box and ship the equipment?
Who in your organization is going step up and at a minimum, provide packaging and a shipping label? No one wants that job. Certainly, no one wants to go in person and collect the equipment.
Get the police involved?
Nope.
This is akin to a contract dispute, not theft. You gave it to them... you say they need to return it. They say they don't need to.
Civil suit in small claims court is your only true recourse.
Who is taking the day and going?
Some employees totally suck. Lots of companies totally suck. Do you really want to argue about who screwed who in front of a judge over 400 dollars of depreciated assets?
Send a mailer. If everything has been amicable and on the up and up most people will put the equipment in the mailer and drop it off at a post office.
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Even better, a lot of them think they're getting an N dollar bonus, not accounting for "but that was five years ago, we wouldn't give this to anyone"-depreciation.
I confess, two of the laptops in my pile of laptops are ex-work, but they were "barely okay" at issue, and it's been, uh.. carry the two... Damn I'm getting old. A while.
We'll just go with a while.
Neither company ever pressed the issue AND neither company sent a shipping label. Couldn't bother. Not about to spend my own money on it if they said they'd send a label. I think they just "disa-poof" in some IT person's inventory that not too many people read.
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My team ends up having to track down laptops, phones, and tablets which the lines of business say they can't find, and in our case if it can be determined the device is likely in the possession of a terminated employee, Legal will send them a demand letter, and that usually gets it returned. We don't tell Legal anything about the usable life remaining for the device.
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They're worth more as a write-off then if they were sent back. If they are sent back, you need IT to spend time absorbing the hardware back into the fold. Most likely, you'll just have someone you pay to go drop it off at e-waste somewhere. Big companies have contracts with HP/Dell/whatever to provide laptops, maybe not even on a per-unit basis if it's a big enough company. The contract might have them be the ones to deal with returned hardware. In the end, the capital expense of the hardware contract is a write-off regardless of the outcome of all the old hardware.
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Huh, living in a country with worker protections (that cuts both ways), where an employer has to have you on a payroll for a month or two after giving you the notice (or settle for even more, several full months of pay if they want to fire you instantly – unless it's a legally specified "dishonourable" discharge, of course), that just feels weird.
Of course, most companies here wouldn't care about some old, half‑broken obsolete deprecated work computer either, perhaps as long as the IT got to scan the semi‑burned barcode sticker, but still...
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I've worked for my current employer for 11 years now and seen more than a few hardware refreshes. Most of them happened in the office, because that's where I was, in the Before Times. Some of the hardware I was more than happy to part with, like the Dell laptop I had for a while. I wasn't the only one who hated those.
But, over the years I've had 2 Thinkpads (one of them the very first one I was issued) "donated" to me because they never asked for them back, along with 3 external drives--2 spinners and an SSD--and even 2 docking stations (for the aforementioned Thinkpads).
I'm on a MBP now and kinda hope they forget to ask for it back again, but I doubt it.
But, over the years I've had 2 Thinkpads (one of them the very first one I was issued) "donated" to me because they never asked for them back, along with 3 external drives--2 spinners and an SSD--and even 2 docking stations (for the aforementioned Thinkpads).
I'm on a MBP now and kinda hope they forget to ask for it back again, but I doubt it.
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Or just hold last paycheck, and any separation paperwork for an in-person pick-up appointment...at which time any company assets may be returned.
Yeah, I don't get how this became a thing either. I would never assume my layoff or firing meant "Yay, free laptop".
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