So it's a way to lock users into the MS cloud ecosystem even more than normal Windows... How nice.
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.
So the title worked and made you click.
(Also, I agree with you, if anything it looks closer to the now "old" Mac Mini design... only very very superficially speaking of course)
It sounds like basically the same thing: a screen, keyboard and mouse that displays windows for apps running on a remote server.
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.
I suggest https://kfx.fr/articles/2024-04-26-onnewdealexp-contrapolis/ and really starting to think about where we are going and where we could go. We could go in a distributed society, resilient like the Internet, spread like Usenet, desktop-computing and homelabs as the norms, where companies who needs more own a shed or more with some racks, p.v. and storage to ensure stable power, FTTH and emergency radio (4G/5G and LEO sat access) full of very dynamic SMEs or a set of large internment camps named smart cities full of inmates and no innovation nor dynamism till the obvious collapse.
BTW that's NOT a political vision but a technical one, because the cloud model will end up there technically anyway.
