Cloudy PCs now often have lower TCO than laptops • The Register

Analyst firm Gartner has declared hosted PCs are now often cheaper to operate than on-prem laptops, and two years away from being cost-effective for 95 percent of workers.

That opinion emerged this week in the firm’s Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service (DaaS), which considers hosted desktops – not traditional on-prem desktop virtualization – and predicts that by 2027, 20 percent of workers will use a hosted machine as their main workspace, up from 10 percent in 2019. The Square of Sorcery also predicts that by 2027, virtual desktops will be cost-effective for 95 percent of workers, up from 40 percent in 2019.

Cost is a big reason for the shift.

“Total cost of ownership for DaaS, especially when users couple it with thin-client endpoints, is now lower than that of a laptop PC for man