The pros and cons of thin clients during a hardware crunch

In early 2023, legal services firm TWM Solicitors got a lean, mean, and virtual machine.

The UK-based law practice gave each of its approximately 220 employees a thin client—a small physical computer (a 10ZiG, in this instance) that connects to one central desktop image managed by the company’s head of IT, Alan Barrett. While the firm had used Microsoft Remote Desktop Services for years, Barrett and his team migrated from that platform to Azure Virtual Desktop, upgraded to Microsoft 365, and rolled out dual monitors across all desks.

Thin clients seem like the right approach for a company with multiple physical locations and just a few IT professionals, including Barrett.

“Having a virtual desktop environment has been absolutely brilliant for us because it’s allowed us to control the configuration very accurately and run it centrally when we have such a diverse and dispersed workforce,” Barrett said.

While thin-client users cite clear benefits such as easy maintenance and tighter security, adoption hasn’t necessarily become mainstream. Analysts who spoke with IT Brew still consider the technology a “niche” endpoint choice. With hardware components getting pricier, however, has the moment arrived for virtual desktops and thin clients?

The pros

A thin client refers to an endpoint device that provides a user interface such as a desktop, but does not store data locally. These lower-cost devices have limited processing power and consist mostly of an onboard CPU, system BIOS, and some form of embedded operating system.

Basically, a central server dishes out an IT-sanctioned desktop and applications to the various terminal-like PCs, with processing and storage happening far away from the end user.

One benefit of this lean approach is that an IT pro doesn’t have to go through the tedious work of updating individual machines. For example, Explore Learning—a UK-based tutoring company that has almost 100 sites, each with as many as 50 computers—wanted a centrally managed way to maintain that huge number of machines.

Daniel Hyatt, the company’s head of IT infrastructure, oversees the use of thin-client devices based on Raspberry Pi, a low-powered, single board computer. “From a management perspective, the beauty is we can remote into these servers. We’ve got one virtual machine, which runs all of the thin clients, so if there’s an update required, we go and update one computer, and all of them get the update immediately,” he told IT Brew in June.

Solid security

Thin clients also feature a security benefit: Any sensitive data lives on one distant server rather than locally on individuals’ laptops.

For Barrett, the thin client setup is ideal for a legal environment with stringent data-protection requirements and a user base that isn’t all that interested in tech beyond it functioning effectively.

“Having a base build which is really regimented means that people can adopt and pick up and learn how to use the system really quickly and just get on with being lawyers,” Barrett told us.

The cons

Jitesh Ubrani, director of consumer devices research at tech-intelligence firm IDC, sees drawbacks with the technology that could slow mainstream adoption. By design, the hardware has lower processing power and may stumble with local compute-heavy tasks like video editing. “It’s designed simply to access something in the cloud, which means the processing that it needs on board is really just enough to run a browser,” Ubrani said.

Also, thin clients are frequently shared, according to Ubrani, and that lack of ownership can lead to decreases in employee satisfaction and productivity.

While Barrett disagrees on performance limitations—he sees a ready-to-go, no-local-updates-required desktop enhancing performance for employees—one major challenge is getting that first image build right and ensuring everybody’s applications are running as usual. That can take testing and tweaking, according to Barrett, like when a transcription tool needing local drivers required a USB plugin and specific configuration settings.

The outlook

Though a lean hardware approach seems appealing in the face of global memory shortages and high PC costs, IDC does not expect a growth in thin client adoption.

Ubrani shared IDC’s projections that thin-client shipments (i.e., when a vendor sells a device to the channel) in the commercial market will face a 5.5% YOY decrease, alongside an 11% YOY dip in shipments of traditional PCs.

In a follow-up email to IT Brew, Ubrani wrote that IDC anticipates price increases for PCs and thin clients, as both are impacted by supply constraints. The prices of thin clients, however, are significantly lower than PCs. “In 2026, we forecast thin clients to cost a few hundred dollars while PCs will be over $1K,” he shared.

Autumn Stanish, director analyst of digital workplace and AI data centers at Gartner, does see companies getting creative in response to the unpredictable hardware market—just not with thin clients. Thin client adoption has “remained relatively stagnant,” she said, adding that organizations could wait out the purchasing problems, leveraging telemetry data to help extend machines beyond their usual cycles.

Stanish views thin clients as a short-term bridge while companies wait out price volatility and see whether agentic PCs with local AI processing are a success with organizations. Those agentic PCs are the polar opposite of thin clients, with higher-end hardware and storage meant to bring compute closer to the end user rather than centralizing everything.

“From a longer-term standpoint, we’re seeing a lot more people want to take advantage of local AI PC capacity and actually getting these really beefy laptops and workstations in their environments, rather than trying to make them leaner and run everything in the cloud,” Stanish said.

Thin clients have always been a niche market, according to Ubrani. “It’s kind of turned into a joke now that thin clients are just five years out from the big thing, and people have been saying that for 10 years or 15 years,” he said. “Yes, it has grown over time, but it has still been very small compared to the broader PC market.”

But thin clients have worked out for Barrett over the years, and he’s satisfied with a lean setup that provides some order in his infrastructure: “All of my users have a clean, standard lockdown environment where all they need to do is work, and every morning it’s ready for them.”