Unfortunately not just regular people. Last time a new employee was hired to my team, the teamlead said just give him this laptop previously used by an external consultant, don't bother formatting it or removing old profiles, just make sure it works.
And we're the software development division in the company.
Yea, some colleagues of mine thought that installing a fresh OS on their laptop would "break" it. The software engineering workforce has its range of very good and very bad employees.
That _can_ happen if the newer OS doesn't have the correct drivers available. I'm a "wiper" but I have spent many an hour trying to get simple functionality working again on a fresh install.
I know that we (IT Folks) are all used to the concept of system images which can be used to deploy fresh builds/images to machines that are based on standards. Further we are used to the idea of VMs that run in clusters/clouds etc. and we are used to virtual desktop environments that run as a terminal interface to a VDI backend, finally we are also familiar checking out files for source control etc.
I believe that we are close to being able to 'check-out' a system image that would be downloaded as a VM to a machine (physical machine) where it runs locally as a fully installed OS - but then can be 'checked in' and released once done. A new physical machine comes along and we check out our image.
We can further abstract the user profile data and have it follow the user (there is a company that was recently bought that does this piece... I cant recall the name).
The idea is high-layer virtualization. Where we had virtualized machine, OS, APP and recently infrastructure such as storage - we have virtualized profiles as well. Soon we will have virtual installs.
There is a hybrid model I wrote about some years ago, posted recently to HN as well - which is similar to the Atrix concept. You have all your user profile data on the mobile device and you effectively check-in to a KVM for better screen and input.
I am not sure about the dock of the Atrix, if it has a CPU and GPU for bigger/faster/better -- but this is what I am referring to.
The data profile is tied to the person. Everything else floats - when the use-case calls for better CPU/GPU you check-out the physical device...
