Reliance Jio to again break the market with Rs 15,000 cloud laptop

If you have Jio before a consumer product’s name, you can know for sure that it’s going to be light on your pockets. Quality and performance are a different debate.

After the Jio Phone, JioBook, and other super economical Jio products, the Mukesh Ambani-led company seems to be talking with major manufacturers including HP, Acer, and Lenovo to launch a cloud laptop for as low as Rs 15,000.

According to a report by the Economic Times, the laptop will act as a “dumb terminal” and all the storage and processing tasks will be managed by the Jio Cloud.

Since the laptop will function from the cloud, it will reduce the need for high-end and expensive hardware. However, one will need an always-on high-speed internet connection to access storage, processing, and other functions from the cloud.

“The cost of a laptop depends on its hardware like memory, processing power, chipset, etc. The greater capacity of this hardware increases costs as well as battery power. What we are doing is, we are stripping all this and the whole processing of the laptop will happen at the back end in the Jio cloud,” ET quoted the Jio official as saying.

Currently, such a laptop costs around Rs 50,000, and launching a budget option will significantly bring down the ownership cost.

Reportedly, HP Chromebook is being tested for the proposed cloud PC and Jio will offer a monthly subscription for the service, not unlike Apple’s iCloud or Google One subscription. The subscription plans are yet to be finalized.

For those who do not want to buy a new device, there are expected to be plans to install the cloud PC software on their existing laptops, desktops, or smart TVs.

While the JioBook runs on the JioOS system, the upcoming cloud laptop is expected to be able to run on various operating systems, including Windows.