With the basic desktops dropping to 400USD or less, I wonder how much they will pay to encrypt such?

Let alone what the increase in support costs will be.

I will share that many years ago, such a lockdown was done at where I worked back then. The result was that the machines were no longer of any use to our department. We moved the machines out of our cubicles, piled them up near an elevator and called transportation for pickup. We also zero'd out the accounts that funded our usage of said machines.

This debacle was the culmination of a bigger problem, but needless to say we saved a lot of money and headaches over this one.

Bob