Live the Thin Client Dream with OneDrive (Premium)

Thanks to Apple’s move from Intel to its own ARM-based chipsets, the relative failure of Windows 10 on ARM, and continued delays in getting Windows 10X to market, we’ve been consumed by a debate about the future of the PC and whether Windows will be swept away at some point by a coming wave of thin clients. Thinking about this rationally, I believe that the future of personal computing is heterogenous, and that users will interact with web services and their data using device types of all kinds.

But we’ve already experienced steps towards this future. Today, most people use smartphones for communications, social networking, and games, and for music, audiobooks, podcasts, videos, and other content. This frees up the PC to return to its roots, so to speak, as a productivity device, where content creation using Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and other similar products is more prevalent.

One side-effect of that change corresponded with the move from traditional hard drives (HDDs) to solid-state storage (SSDs) for PC storage. SSDs are smaller, faster, quieter, and more power-efficient than HDDs, but in the beginning of this shift, especially, they also provided smaller storage allotments. So there was a period of time in which you might have gone from a laptop with a 1 TB HDD to a 64 or 128 GB SSD.

That sounds like it might be problematic, but that shift in usage means that most people don’t need to store as much data on their PCs. I used to sync podcasts, a music collection, some selection of videos, and some archive of work-related data to my PC each time I traveled, for example. But since I access content on my smartphones (or, in the case of video when traveling, my iPad), I just don’t need as much storage space on my PC as I used to.

But how low can you go?

I use OneDrive for my work-related data and I’ve accumulated a 25+ year archive of all of the content I’ve written dating back to the early 1990s. (I also use OneDrive to store my personal photo collection, though I consider Google Photos to be the primary source for that data; I also have small apps and digital music collections in OneDrive.) What’s changed over the years is the way I organize this data, and much of that change has been driven by changes in the way that OneDrive works.

And the Files on Demand feature---available on the Windows PCs I use, but also on the Mac---has triggered the biggest change. This feature has evolved since it was finally (re)introduced in Windows 10 back in 2017, but I really like the way it works now: If you sign-in to Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, or if you manually sign-in to the OneDrive app, you can by default access your entire OneDrive storage structure, including all the files it contains, from File Explorer (or from any app that can access the file system) without even needing to sync those files to the PC.

Naturally, this system requires your PC to be online. And if you do open a file “on dem...