Looks like Microsoft entered the terminal end point game with Windows 365 Link. Does this offer something no other vendor in market offers?

Intune management - however, technically IGEL does that now too. That does require the end-user to sign in which then kicks off the enrolment process. Perhaps Link will support automated enrolment at the device level

It does look like its more seamless and feels more like a local PC experience. With the right pricing it might just be that much more compelling. The end point is useless for anything else.

Think of Microsoft's gaming consoles being sold at cost or at a loss. I don't know if this is the case, but essentially they can mass produce these devices, sell them at cost/loss as they'll pick the money up on the subscription (W365/AVD), and on top of all of that they can bake in optimizations and capabilities that 3rd party endpoint providers wouldn't be able to. I can see consumers/SMB going all-in with this, especially if it starts getting packaged as a larger offering, but IMO enterprise adoption will yet to be seen.

@Stephen Daniel Wagner Windows365 is not for consumers?

@Thomas Poppelgaard, not yet... In my own thoughts I'm seeing a bigger play long term. Look at all the marketing.... "Cloud PC", "Windows as a Service", etc.... Now we have this....

it would be a great idea to have it for consumers like they have xbox cloud gaming where you get it for free or its included in gamepass ultimate:D

Bottom line, lots of possibilities. 🙂

the windows365 link is in my opinion for SMB/Enterprises

I thought it was sub 400, don’t see a MacMini for that amount and then managing MacMinis would also be more complicated even with Intune. We will see how this pans out. I’m sure a beefier one for AVD will come sometime too if this takes off.

itis not for business customers I would think, you need Intune premium or higher license to manage it, only enterprise Win365 customers do have that. For business customers it would mean an extra license over a $349 client + the Win365 sub price.. that is hefty price per user per year for a desktop in the cloud

Business customers without Intune, but with Windows 365 would use this device unmanaged. It will still join the target Entra ID tenant for SSO. An unmanaged device is likely to still install updates, and I assume without any entry points into device settings the default would be similar to a Windows 11 device. Enterprise customers with Intune (this includes customers with Business Premium) will have Intune P1, so will be able to manage the device. The number of Microsoft 365 customers without Intune licenses is shrinking (i.e., Business Standard, or Office 365 only), so the cross over of Windows 365 customers and Microsoft 365 customers will narrow with practically everyone but the smallest of organisations having an Intune license.

Are you Aaron? someone told me that Intune management is a requirement with this device....

I'll bet it isn't. Windows 365 Business management is done via the Microsoft 365 admin center, so the target customers may not have an Intune license. The Link device runs Windows, so I'm sure it will work with Entra join only.

on the Microsoft site it says they are managed with Intune.. perhaps there is an opt-out but that isn't mentioned