I think that’s the same answer someone would say about an IBM mainframe in 1990. And just as wrong.
I’ll use my stupid hobby home server stuff as an example. I tossed the old VMware box years ago. You know what I use now? Little HP t6x0 thin clients. They are crappy little x86 SoCs with m2 slots, up to 32GB memory and they can be purchased used for $40. They aren’t fast, but perform better than the cheaper AWS and GCP instances.
In that a trivial use case? Absolutely. Now move from $30 to about $2000. Buy a Mac Mini. It’s a powerful arm soc with ridiculously fast storage and performance. Probably more compute than a small/mid size company computer room a few years ago and more performant than a $1M SAN a decade ago.
6G will bring 10gig cellular.
Hyperscalers datacenters are the mainframe of 2025.
A hyperscaler (or a cloud providers in general) does not only sell you compute in terms of a compute node but rather in compute as a service. There are some value adds, like e.g., AWS cloud services, but on a pure compute level you pay for elasticity and reliability. A comparison between a cloud provider and your homelab also needs to account for connectivity, which likely is in strong favor (latency/ reliability) of a cloud provider or DC compared to a office or home.
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Do you happen to have a link for your HP t6x0 reference? I tried https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=hp+thin+client+32gb+-(4... and there seemed to be plenty with 32GB of storage but none that I could find with that much RAM
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