I'm not on the up-and-up with Intel. I know they're building a fab in Ohio... generally, does anyone know what their next moves are meant to be? I'm curious to hear about their business plan -- I know they've been lagging some other producers in recent years.
"Catch up to TSMC at 1.8nm" is the dream. So fabbing other customers' stuff.
On the product side, Intel seems to be doubling down on GPUs, in spite of troubling rumors about Arc gen 2.
Of course the question is what will be on time and what will be delayed. Previous delays obliterated the product lineups Intel meticulously planned before.
The Moore’s Law Is Dead YT channel claims the GPU as been delayed and "cut back" to a more modest size... But on second thought, I regret making that claim, as MLID is a unreliable source. For instance, they previously claimed Arc was canceled, and die size revisions don't really happen this close to release.
Considering Intel recently cut their annual payout from $1.46 per share to $0.50 per share, while simultaneously building 3 new fabs and expanding 3 others, I somehow doubt it.
Ah, classic Intel. Randomly start making/selling X with great fanfare, maybe do that pretty well for a while, then quietly abandon X later. For any X != "x86 CPU's".
My greatest fear is when they decide they don't know what to do with FPGAs anymore and get rid of Altera (please do this, Intel, your website doc format is awful compared to good old Altera's)
Funnily enough, Intel did used to make PLDs in the 90s. And back then, Altera actually rebranded and sold them!
Their FPGA business group grew 2x last year, compared to every other business unit which shrunk anywhere between 10-30%. If anything, it's their golden child at the moment. They've just announced they're getting back into the mid and low-end devices with Agilex 5 and 3, and now do a RF focused Agilex 9 product, so I really doubt it's going anywhere: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpg...
That sounds a lot like Google, but Intel doesn't throw as many things at the wall to see what sticks. NUCs have been around for 10+ years; that's much longer than Stadia or Reader.
Intel also developed a track record of only being able to do a good job on one x86 design at a time. Doing Pentium M and Pentium 4 at the same time didn't work out so well, and neither did Core and Atom. And then for a several years the number actually dropped to zero as they had to keep recycling their existing designs and couldn't get a successful post-Skylake architecture out the door. Now that they're shipping both Core and Atom lineages on the same silicon, they might do a bit better at not leaving one to fall into irrelevance.
Same story. I looked at a NUC as a possible SFF PC, balked at the price, and ended up buying a Lenovo M93p Tiny off a guy on Craigslist for a lot less.
I fell in love with Lenovo and HP SFF/'tiny pcs' a couple years ago. It can be tricky to find ample display outs in a preferred hardware configuration but otherwise they've been cheap, quiet, reliable and efficient. I realized as much as I like the tech and even idea of gaming, I don't game much anymore at all so without the need for a proper GPU these things have really simplified computing in my life to the point I have very capable extra hardware for projects and experiments ready to just plug in and go.
10/10 will buy more again
I run mine headless. It's a great little x86 box for Jellyfin/home automation/logging/anything I want to run inside my local network that doesn't need graphics and won't accidentally get turned off.
Same here, I wanted to have a mini desktop to transplant the hard drive of a dying laptop, so I was looking into them, and exactly because of that I gave up.
This is sad, because the Intel NUCs were some of the last computers with adequate technical documentation.
For most modern computers you cannot be 100% sure about what you get for your money, until you have them in your hands and you can run tests yourself. By then, if you discover that the computer is not exactly what you want, it is too late. You cannot get your money back because the computer is not defective, it is just different from what you expected. There are helpful published product reviews, but those do not cover all products, especially not most of the cheaper versions.
In recent years, many small Chinese companies have introduced various small computers that are much more innovative than the latest Intel NUC models, but they have little or no documentation (at least in English) and they frequently have manufacturing quality problems, so the Intel NUCs will be missed.
Moreover, until now nobody has made good computers with 35 W CPUs and with a volume of less than 0.5 L or good computers with 45 W CPUs and with a volume of less than 0.7 L, except Intel. All the alternatives use either bigger cases or less powerful CPUs.
I had the same feeling of disappointment when Intel exited the consumer motherboard business. I bought one of their Ivy Bridge generation motherboards for my PC build at the time because it was the only one that I could confirm had the features I wanted. The motherboard manual listed details like the part numbers for the SuperIO, Firewire and audio chips, the location of the temperature sensors on the board, the current ratings for the fan headers. I knew exactly what I was getting, and knew there was no reason to shell out for a more "high end" motherboard because there wouldn't have been any improvement to any functionality I cared about.
Man do I miss the days of DFI motherboards when their engineers would pop into the overclocking community and share code snippets of relevant BIOS firmware. The things were so well documented there were something like 3 or 4 third-party BIOS distributions.
Then there was their community and RMA manager Dona. That woman had to be one of the hardest working people I've ever encountered. She must have slept like 5 hours a day. People could post on some obscure forum about a defect and she'd find the post and make it right. One time, when I was around 16 in 2007, I broke a very niche and specific overclocking record on DDR2 latency that still passed Memtest x86, and Dona hooked me the hell up. Suddenly started getting all sorts of companies sending me heatsinks, RAM, PSU's, etc to "review" if I wanted to. Sidenote to this tangent - I have to say, the ultra-fine grit sandpaper kit with 12 sheets in increasing grit, was absolutely my favorite. Learned how to sand a heatsink down to a near mirror finish and shaved a few degrees celsius off my de-capped AMD Opteron 165.
DFI BIOS were famous for exposing the most settings for regulating RAM/ CPU/ Chipset/ GPU/ SATA/ PCI-E/ IDE communication and lanes. This guide/ participating in the DFI overclocking community probably taught me more about the fundamentals of computer science, and how all those electrons move around to make the sand think. https://forums.overclockersclub.com/topic/100835-the-definit...
I’m guessing we are of similar age. I also had similar experiences and remember Dona. Looking back the DFI boards were ridiculously good as an overclocker there wasn’t anything you couldn’t learn about and tweak. I feel like that was the golden age of performance consumer hardware.
Fond memories of that time period, hanging out on BlazingPC and other forums. Back then my primary setup was cooled with a Vapor phase change machine if I remember right. Hummed along at about -60 Celsius under load and was super stable even at close to 5ghz I think it was. I also had a bunch of Kayl GPU & CPU pots which meant I was always chomping at the bit to do dry ice / ln2 sessions and crank out a few digits of pi. Now I have an M1 Max, how boring.
Thanks for reminding me cududa. Sounds like we may have competed for a few records back in the day
> For most modern computers you cannot be 100% sure about what you get for your money, until you have them in your hands and you can run tests yourself. By then, if you discover that the computer is not exactly what you want, it is too late. You cannot get your money back because the computer is not defective, it is just different from what you expected.
Can you give an example? Clearly you are concerned with more than just the listed specs. Do you mean like RAM and SSD models? Or even lower level than this?
For most laptops (some gaming machines excepted) you don't find out the CPU and GPU power limits until after you install third-party software to inspect those settings. The turbo power limits affect system performance far more than minor clock speed differences between different Intel SKUs with similar core counts; it's not uncommon to find that the difference between an i5 and an i7 matters less than the unspecified thermal and power delivery limits.
The spec sheets that are provided for pre-built consumer machines will at best identify the two or three most expensive chips and give you a vague idea of what class of part they selected for up to a dozen other components. You will definitely never get the specificity of a PCPartPicker parts list. You won't be able to audit the list of components for ones that are known to be problematic for Linux use.
And as a bonus, "You cannot get your money back because the computer is not defective, it is just different from what you expected" isn't true for them; you can return for any/no reason in the first two weeks.
That is also not true for any European customer in general. There is a 14-day return period without any questions asked on any product barring a few perishable/date sensitive/hygienic concerns.
Is there a mac mini model that hits a sweet spot on price and performance? I’d love to run a little cluster of mac minis. Maybe one of the intel ones so you could just throw on linux and something like slurm or pbs?
Depending on situation, the way NUCs typically needed external power bricks also made them less attractive. Mac minis aren't as small no, but the size difference for having the PSU be internal is minimal and it eases power strip woes.
Price aside, the power brick was always a huge annoyance that kept me from getting one. Now that usbc gan chargers can hit 100W, I keep hoping for a mini pc option that runs a ~65W class CPU with integrated GPU on a non proprietary charger.
I had a 6th gen and now a 11th gen NUC (both used) as a little home server to run docker/plex . (since the intel chips can do transcoding pretty well).
Runs so well, cool and quiet in a closet shelf.
They will be missed, I guess I'll have to look at similar devices from non-Intel in the future.
I've had one for about 7 years now that's been my htpc. Nice, little, quiet, and it worked great. Was thinking about upgrading soon. Guess I'll have to figure something else out.
YMMV but I've found my watching:fiddling-with-the-system ratio to be way higher with Jellyfin than it ever was in my years and years of trying and failing to enjoy Kodi/XBMC. And it's way more usable for other members of my family, who tended to look at Kodi and (understandably) just go "nope, not touching that". If they actually tried they'd usually need me to rescue them from some weird, useless mode they'd gotten stuck in, before they managed to watch anything. Zero such trouble with Jellyfin. And the (web) admin interface is so much nicer & faster to use, on the rare occasions that I do need to go change something. Again, I get that some people find Kodi OK, but it might be worth taking a look if you're not totally, entirely happy with it.
Similar issue with x265 content though. I've solved that by just using Apple TVs for our two TVs—also fixes any worries about surround not outputting correctly or whatever, that you can run into with hacked-together solutions. Spendy, but they've wasted none of my time and have never not-worked. Any other devices we connect to it with (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones) all support x265, so that's a non-issue. Maybe newer Rokus support x265, IDK, but none of mine do, which is the only reason I'm not still using those as my set-top client devices.
(if you stick with Kodi, though: RPi4 supports hardware x265, I think)
I just performed fan-replacement surgery on the one I gave to my mom about 7 years ago. Still works great for her other than the fan that died. Not extremely easy to replace but not bad and it only cost about $15. I looked into replacing it but a quick search didn't turn up anything comparable for less than $500.
We bought a couple of i7 NUCs every time a new generation was launched, mainly to have access to the latest GPU features.
That is, we hoped to use Intel's MFX Media SDK for transcoding h264 (or even h265) video. Unfortunately both the SDK and the hardware were too much of a moving target, going from software to hardware only, Windows only then later linux only on CentOS, then only on Ubuntu, then (partially) open source. Dropping support for older generations, breaking API changes. Opaque licensing policies.
At some point we gave up and simply went with ffmpeg. Works great on AMD too, or ARM for that matter.
Still using a NUC as main development machine, extremely fast and mostly quiet.
Haven't tried, but I don't expect it to be competitive. Note that software transcoding means: CPU only, and M1/M2 is still just a bunch or ARM cores.
We've tested on Amazon's Graviton 2 and 3 systems and so-far found them to be on par or slightly cheaper than their x86-64 counterparts. But this is mostly due to AWS aggressive pricing of ARM systems, which is quite the contrary for Apple hardware.
MacMini's currently are approximately twice as expensive as the Intel i7 NUC, Gigabyte Brix and similar hardware we bought. Also, dev tools targeting server software development on Apple hardware (ie. Linux, please!) are still wanting.
Intel coined NUC as "Next Unit of Computing" in 2012. I don't believe they claim a trademark on the term, but I've not seen any other company use it. There's plenty of other products with a similar footprint, it's about as small as you can shrink a board with a mainstream laptop chip with modular memory and storage, and a decent amount of ports.
It's Intel branding for their SBC efforts - "Single Board Computer", I'd argue. While officially it stood for "Next Unit of Computing", every Intel NUC was effectively an SBC more or less, from designs small enough to fit in an HDMI dongle to Mac Mini style units. The SBC architecture is what permits the form factors.
They only targeted enthusiasts but there's incredible competition above and below.
Down market, there are way cheaper 1L business PCs which are mass produced for businesses but work great for consumers wanting small quiet (or not, 65w options also available) systems.
Up market, there's all manner of small form factor gaming PCs and others.
Intel did have a knack for having interesting twists & innovations, but they rarely were must have advantages. Building the whole PC on a card was an interesting & useful move, for their gaming Extreme series. Skull Canyon back in 2016 showed a power density and level of integration that the world didn't know had been possible. The price has always been high, too high for critical success, but I thanks Intel for pushing new things & pushing the market. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-...
Every time I looked at getting a NUC when I wanted a SFF system I ran into this problem. If I just needed a low power Linux box I could get a cheapo Atom device or even just a Raspberry Pi. If I needed more power a SFF PC, a laptop, or even a Mac mini was usually an overall better buy accounting for my time invested.
I buy 2-4 year old Dell (or similar) micro desktops just for this reason. Just enough upgradability (SSD/RAM, sometimes even CPU) and just enough power but runs cool and quiet.
Recently bought a lot of 10 Dell Optiplex Micros for around $1,200 USD all ready to go (9th gen / 16GB DDR4 / 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro) for a small business that works on spreadsheets and basic data entry all day. Replaced old desktop towers and employees were happy to have more free desk/working space.
They are only cheaper if you are buying the higher end units, and comparing them to the higher end NUC's like the Skull Canyon
If you get down into the Celeron Models and the price really can not be beat.
I have bought a TON of Celeron NUC's to run as Kioks, Signage, and other Single Application purposes, never found anything from Lenovo, Dell, etc that could beat the price
Of all the NUCs they ever made; there is one singular model with 10G ethernet. And yeah good luck getting it.
The lack of any significant IO to the outside world crippled these things massively.
I tried to order 3 NUCs once; after waiting 6 months for stock, I gave up.
Seems nothing will actually be lost.
Anybody make ANYTHING that is nuc-like and has 10G+? HP Elitedesk 800 mini has a flexio option for a single 10g port, but it's the only similar thing I have discovered.
Great point. But also I think a company like Intel deliberately segments aka removes useful functionality from cheaper systems, wanting to protect the very profitable, more expensive systems with better ethernet or whatnot.
Looks like there's some stuff on aliexpress like [0]. 2x10G SFP + 4x2.5G + 6 SATA ports for $343 bare seems like a pretty great NAS box on paper, assuming the processor and internal IO can actually handle everything. There's also [1] with 2x10G SFP and 3x2.5G for $276. Personally I'm hoping for something with 10G SFP + 6xSATA + an N305 processor, which I think doesn't exist yet. On paper, the N305 is almost 2x as good as the i5-6600 I have in my desktop, and these things use almost no power, so that'd make for a killer home server/NAS.
I have seen R86S and variants, but as you said it's not quite there either. I understand they are achieving this by putting an OCP 3.0 slot on the bottom of their SBC (though probably with limited PCIe lanes). I'd be happy to see the trend continue.
I thought NBase-T was gonna finally save us all until Marvell bought Aquantia and they started hosing us with speed-limited variants of their chipsets. Now everyone sees a 2.5gb nic and they are stoked for the huge upgrade instead of recognizing that it's really just a crippled 10gb nic
10G Ethernet is just not a great standard, and a terrible fit for something like a NUC at 5W of waste heat in just that one port. Lots of SFP and 2.5G around, though.
This could be good news for Framework. For me, the ability to upgrade a laptop's main board and then use the old one like a NUC is a big selling point. As their userbase grows it will be easer to pickup used boards for cheap.
I guess? I mean, I would happily consider a Framework mini-PC, but buying literal laptop boards when I don't actually want a laptop, and then having to, what, cobble together a power supply and case, etc? I found it a lot more convenient to buy a barebones NUC, put in some Crucial RAM and an SSD... considerably cheaper too.
They sell a case for $40 on their site. Assembly is about as complex as adding Crucial RAM and an SSD to a barebones NUC. For power, you can use just about anything that will deliver 60W+ over USB C.
I wish Intel or someone would get into the enthusiast firewall market. Very High GHZ 2 to 4 core CPU, 2 to 4 NICs, x86, <$250, 1-8GB soldered RAM, Simple M2, very basic video out, would be very popular for home firewalls and maybe even businesses with a decent IT department/person as a Firewall/VPN appliance.
This provides up to 4 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, plus WiFi.
The passively-cooled metal box has 2 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, but you can add another 2 ports with Ethernet USB dongles. It has a slow quadruple 2 GHz Cortex-A55 CPU, but this is still very fast in comparison with the older Raspberry Pi models and its Ethernet and USB ports are much better than those of any Raspberry Pi, allowing full speed.
The schematic of this firewall/router is public, which is good. Also, unlike for Intel or AMD CPUs, much more public documentation about the CPU is available, which makes it more trustworthy.
The RK3568 CPU has good Linux support, but even so, an ARM-based computer can be recommended only to an experienced Linux user, because many problems can appear when attempting to install and configure various programs.
For now, ARM-based computers can be recommended only when the cost of the computer, including the DRAM memory does not exceed $150.
Starting at $150 for computer + DRAM, it is possible to find computers with Intel Alder Lake N CPUs (e.g. N100, N200 or i3-N305). These are much faster than any ARM-based computer, with the exception of those that are many times more expensive (like those sold by NVIDIA, MediaTek or Qualcomm).
The NanoPi is quite reasonable. There is a bigger one that has the I/O I need and a RK3588S, which is a pretty impressive SoC. I have an Orange Pi 5 with that SoC and the performance is beyond my expectations. I generally prefer stock Debian to OpenWRT anyway; I never know how to do what I want to do in the GUI, but I do know what iptables rules I want to write, so that's all good.
Of course not in stock, nothing good ever is, but someday...
Devices similar to what you are asking for are out there now, in recent years the market for these devices seems to have exploded. I recently built something similar to this one with i7 of some generation or other and quad 2.5gbit NICs etc. They are available in all sorts of neat fanless configs and a range of CPUs, and generally have no issues saturating all 4 ports at peak speeds etc. I just pulled the first hit from Amazon for "vpn appliance":
Being that they are just PCs, you can install pfSense or whatever solution you want. They are silent and no larger than a typical network switch. If anything, the enthusiast firewall market has been well served recently - there are well over 20+ models on amazon alone right now intended for homemade firewalls or routers.
This is disappointing - I own four of these. I deliberately bought the older new-old stock units that were on clearance prices. One sits on a shelf in my basement next to my Synology NAS, and is a headless Ubuntu box I use as a very low-end build server for my blogs and writing projects. It mounts a server directory, I VSCode into it and run Makefiles. It works wonderfully... plenty fast. One is a media server machine in our family room, mostly for streaming TV shows. One is currently waiting on a replacement fan. One is a Windows box for those rare times I need to run Windows specific programs for work.
These were the perfect sweet spot for me between abusing low-end laptops and shelling out real money. My kids put them together with me and it was a nice learning experience for them, too.
I was hoping I'd be able to upgrade/replace these piecemeal as needed. I guess I'll have to look into other replacements for when these give out.
I always wanted to like these, but they seemed consistently overpriced by like 30%. I'd price one out with all the necessary parts, and by the end it was always like, why am I not just buying a mac mini (or an RPi, for lower-intensity applications)?
I would say there's a huge performance gap between the most powerful Pi and even a Nuc mini from 6 years ago. Hard to consider them in the same ballpark, use-case-wise.
The NUCs had a pretty wide range of processor options, and often fairly-old ones with low core counts from lower-end processor lines were still for sale—but never at what felt like the correct price to me, especially since they usually needed memory and a disk (the ones that came with those seemed like an even worse deal)
I’ve done Coremark scores across a range of different systems including NUCs and Pi’s.
A Pi 4 gets a single thread score of about 10k and a new entry level NUC gets about 20k.
If you look at older systems a Beelink T4 Pro Mini (using a much older CPU) gets about 11k well within the same ballpark as a Pi4. Comparing that to a similar aged Pi a Pi3B gets about 4k score.
For comparison a high end AMD Ryzen gets about 45K.
They make for nice little quiet home linux servers if you need more power than an RPi. A mac mini would be a good choice, too, but then you're stuck on macOS.
A NUC with an i3 Raptor Lake CPU and 16 GB DRAM is slightly less than EUR 400, a NUC with an i7 Raptor Lake CPU and 64 GB DRAM is slightly less than EUR 800, both with all taxes included.
If you buy the cheapest MB, the cheapest case and PSU and the cheapest Pentium or Celeron desktop CPU, you can get a desktop that is cheaper than a NUC, but with less peripheral interfaces, i.e. without the Thunderbolt ports included in a NUC, and which will not be faster than a NUC.
On the other hand if you compare a NUC with a laptop that has a similar number of peripheral interfaces and a similar CPU speed, then you discover that the laptops are incredibly overpriced and only mobile workstations or top gaming laptops of $3000 or more can match a NUC.
None of the laptops available from a major vendor has so many peripheral ports as a NUC. None of the laptops that use the same CPU as a NUC has a comparable speed to the NUC. The reason is that NUCs have much better cooling. In the recent NUCs, the CPU can dissipate 35 W indefinitely, without overheating, even if the CPUs have a nominal TDP of only 28 W.
Because of this I have stopped upgrading my Dell Precision mobile workstation and I have replaced it with a NUC together with a 17" portable monitor and a compact keyboard. This combo has less than half the price of a comparable mobile workstation, it is much lighter, by more than 1 kg than a 17" laptop, it needs less volume in my backpack, and because it has more peripheral ports I carry less dongles.
I have always used my laptop on a desk, connected to the mains power, wherever I have to go in a business trip, so using a NUC changes nothing from this POV.
These Werke never a good market fit. They couldnt compete with normal medium Form factor builds on price, couldnt compete with chinese small nuc like computers in the low end (ironically using Intel chips) and raspberry pis for the SOC Space.
They ended up being bad competitions for high end gaming PCs giving you notebook like power for desktop gaming prices. I'm surprised they survived this long.
I tried a few different SBCs for my HTPC before biting the bullet and shelling out the $500 for a 11th generation NUC. It was worth every penny, as I've had zero issues with it since.
I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.
The Mac Mini is a totally different market: it 1) runs macOS 2) has Apple Silicon 3) has no competitors for running macOS 4) is the cheapest entry point into iOS development which is a high paying job
Definitely does not rule so absolutely that you can ignore iOS development. In Western Europe my anecdata is that iPhone is winning with high frequency users.
OFC it's the second one over Android smartphones. Which is the alternative? Still, in Spain, France, Italy, Germany... the iPhone it's seen for poshy people and Android covers the 90% of the needs of the average guy at a much cheaper price.
Is that supposed to be positive or negative? Because the only thing I'm reading is "I can think of nothing positive to say, but if you absolutely have to use macos, it totally runs that.".
Well, if you want to run macOS, you have one choice, if you want to run Windows or Linux, you have 1000 choices. This will drive profit margins among the 1000 choices to roughly zero
How do you know this? I personally decided against a mini when I specced one out and a MBP wound up cheaper. The pricing strategy certainly made me _feel_ like they were pushing me away from the mini.
TBH I dont own a mini but I have used it and it seems fine. online reviews are also decent if you go above baseline 8Gb. but thats targeted towards mac users which are already in higher price bracket so not too bad. plus its better if power consumption and noise level.
overall I feel that there is enough integration density in processors that the laptop form factors will be good enough for most common (& semi advanced) uses. so this seems like an odd decision to move out of that market (technically) but if you factor in business then it starts to makes sense.
Intel nucs are fine too. The question isn’t if they’re fine, the question is if they make good business sense.
Also, apple’s crazy profitability means they may offer something like the mini that doesn’t sell as well as their laptop, while intel is ruthlessly cutting out things that aren’t part of their core business because of their monetary issues.
If Intel can’t compete with cheaper manufacturers and its not hitting their internal required rate of return then it may no longer justify having that business unit at all.
As much as I love using MacOS, the Intel NUCs offer upgradability for SSD and RAM which makes it harder to go with the Mac Mini if you need larger storage or memory.
Assuming you have an external monitor already, one can get pretty nice deals on Mac minis. I paid less than $1500 for an Apple Silicon Mac mini and a similarly specc'd MBP cost something like $800-$1000 more. Later on, I can continue to upgrade by replacing with a newer Mini or Apple Studio at a lower price (and better cooling) than buying a new laptop.
the one I have for my daughter is okay. gets the job done but wont use for gaming etc. I do however want to get the Beelink GTR7 [1]. that seems amply powered and decent build quality/noise level.
it seems that from the point of view of the cooling and noise they are significantly improved over earlier Beelink models, so any of the two variants seems like a good choice.
An alternative is Minisforum UM790, which is configured for a lower CPU power and which has slightly less peripheral interfaces.
I bought one with an AMD 4800U in early 2022 to be used as a cheap, dedicated Linux device for work (mostly Remote Desktop plus some local docker development environments) and it’s been rock solid for me.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been happy enough with mine for the price that I had already decided I would be choosing Beelink for my next mini PC over a NUC.
That said, I have seen some mixed reports of some issues around thermal throttling and eGPU support for some of the newer gaming focused ones, but I think if you have realistic expectations given the form factor (and especially if you’re not going for gaming) then they are fairly reliable and sturdy little devices.
* Also note, I bought mine barebones and added my own ram and SSD. I can’t speak to the quality of what they ship with, but I also haven’t heard any complaints from others with that regard.
I've deployed about two dozen of them for small business clients who needed the form factor.
Everyone has loved them. I wound up getting one to manage my print farm, and no complaints there, either. Knock on wood, but they Just Work, so far. Noise and heat have not been an issue, even with the oldest units.
Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.
> Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.
The Mac mini has always been Apple's low-cost trojan horse product for existing PC users who already have a keyboard, mouse and display. The issues with keeping it updated in the past had more to do with the Intel processors available to Apple.
In the short Apple Silicon era, the Mac mini has been upgraded multiple times. It's remains an important product.
Maybe they should though. A lot of people buy a laptop just to only ever use it on their desk and never actually take it anywhere. A desktop computer with equivalent performance will generally be several hundred dollars cheaper and run quieter as well.
Have you actually looked at the price of pre-built desktops lately?
Check out all the big computer manufacturers like Dell and HP. Go to their “cheap desktops” section (e.g., Dell Inspiron).
Focusing on Dell, the cheapest one I see is $499 and the specs are a 13th gen i5, Intel UHD 730, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD. Bring your own monitor!
For laptops, the Inspiron 15 for $430 gets you 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 11th gen core i5, Iris Xe graphics.
Why am I buying that desktop instead of the laptop? What is my motivation?
Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.
In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air, and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Desktops just don’t have a price advantage because nobody wants them, so there’s no economy of scale.
> Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.
Yes, that's who the Mac mini is primarily targeted at--PC users that want a Mac but don't want to spend a lot of money and who have a keyboard, mouse and display.
> In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air…
It takes a lot to actually get any Apple Silicon Mac with a fan to make enough sound to actually be heard. If you read the reviews for the Mac mini, nobody has ever said fan noise was an issue because they never heard any.
> and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Also not accurate.
Because desktops have more room, you can get more cores (both CPU and GPU) and run them faster (and therefore hotter) than you can in a laptop. The fact the M-series chips came from the iPhone's A-series has nothing to do with performance. A $499 M2 Mac mini has 4 performance CPU cores and 8 GPU cores while a $1,199 iPhone 14 Pro Max has 2 performance CPU cores and 5 GPU cores. That's the beauty of ARM: it scales from phones to laptops to servers.
If you need more storage, you can get 8 TB in a Mac mini, while the MacBook Air maxes out at 2 TB.
The Mac mini has always been the workhorse of the Mac line and hasn't changed. Just going from Intel to ARM made the Mac mini a no-brainer replacement for the old Intel Mac Pros, which were the poster children for loud desktop computers.
I wish Apple disclosed individual product line sales because I think they would show that I am right and you are wrong ;-)
I don't think the Mac mini is the workhorse or a strong seller of the Mac lineup; it's just a convenient little niche to keep around.
Regarding performance advantage: When Apple was on Intel, Intel's SKUs had way more of a wattage/thermal difference between their product lines: The 16" MacBook Pro was sucking down 100 watts while my current 14" MacBook Pro can stay charged on an iPhone charging brick.
So when you look at a Mac Mini at $600 having a handful of extra cores over a $1000 MacBook Air, it's like, "yes, it's technically faster," but not "I'm going to be able to enable new workflows with this additional performance."
If you can play a game or edit a video or browse the web on a Mac mini, you'll be able to do the exact same thing on a MacBook Air and, as a generally subjective human, not notice any difference in capability or speed. This was not the case when Apple was selling 12" MacBooks that felt miserably slow editing a Word document new out of the box.
Regarding storage: That 8TB upgrade is only available on the top-tier Mac mini, and choosing it brings you to $3699. Choose the lowest tier MacBook Pro 14" with that same storage upgrade and for $4399 and you get the exact same processor with the exact same performance (not thermally limited), and on top of that you get a 120Hz mini-LED high DPI display, keyboard, trackpad, webcam, battery, and all the convenience that a laptop gets you.
What person with nearly $4000 to spend on a system is going to choose not to have a laptop for less than 20% more money when they don't even lose even a single digit percent of performance? It's not like the Mac mini is internally expandable or upgradable at all.
I would bet the majority of Mac minis sold are used as ci/cd servers for iOS and Mac development. I would also bet the Mac mini is the third lowest selling Mac with the Mac ultra and Mac Pro being the least.
The Mac Minis are a great value compared to the rest of Apple's lineups. The NUC is overpriced, like why would I get that instead of a generic laptop? It was just a poor value for what it offered.
A generic laptop has much less peripheral ports and also slower peripheral ports and a much slower CPU.
There are a lot of users who need many other peripherals besides keyboard and mouse and who prefer to not use a ton of dongles. Sometimes no dongle can help with a laptop, because the aggregate throughput of all its USB ports is just too small.
A NUC is much faster than a generic laptop which uses the same CPU, because it has much better cooling. In all recent 0.5 L NUCs the CPU can dissipate 35 W forever without overheating.
No generic laptop can do that. There are plenty of gaming laptops or mobile workstations that can match or exceed the speed of a NUC, but those cost between two and eight times more than a NUC, so a NUC or a similar SFF computer is a much better value than such a laptop and even together with a portable monitor and a compact keyboard it is easier to carry in a backpack than a big and heavy laptop. I have done this for years.
Thanks, that is a useful differentiation: laptops for portability and "good enough" for office work, NUCs and small form factor computers for performance in a limited space.
Just from anecdotal observation, the iMac seems to have several niches where a fashionable desktop is called for: at least higher-end shops and lobbies, and musicians and other artists who dabble in production enough to need the larger screen but not enough to invest in a more expensive setup.
The Mini seems more specialized. I’ve bought many of them over the years for things like video installations, but I never see them in “regular people use”.
For quite some years I just said "buy a notebook and (if you really need it) monitor with keyboard/ mouse".
With an SSD and a decent amount of RAM any notebook is fine for 95% of what people want from the home computer, with a small exception of gaming with a better settings than low/middle.
At this point nor Mini, nor any other SFF 'desktop' doesn't make sense, because you can't take it with you if you need.
IMO a laptop is bulky and inconvenient to place on my desk. The battery is an unnecessary hazard. Having to open the screen to power on the device is inconvenient
I think there are lots of reasons to prefer a minipc to laptop. Personally if I need a computer on the go, I use my phone. Much lighter and smaller.
I’ve found I have little use for my laptop, as a portable machine, since adding an iPad alongside my phone. I doubt I’ll buy another laptop in the future and certainly not a new one (3 y/o Thinkpad maybe).
I’ll probably go with a gaming desktop or a NUC sized machine and a gaming console depending on what the market looks like in a couple years.
A Mini is very large (1.4 L) in comparison with a NUC (0.5 L) and indeed a Mac Mini would be inconvenient to carry.
On the other hand, a NUC together with a 17" portable monitor and a compact keyboard weighs less than a 17" gaming computer or mobile workstation and it is easier carried in a backpack, while offering similar performance and more peripheral ports, eliminating the need to also carry dongles.
When you know that a monitor and a keyboard are available at the destination, e.g. when commuting between home and office, than carrying only the NUC is far more convenient than carrying even the thinnest and lightest laptop.
So you can always take a NUC with you wherever you need. I have done this in many business trips, as a much better alternative to carrying a big and heavy mobile workstation laptop.
> and more peripheral ports, eliminating the need to also carry dongles.
My notebook has three USB ports. In the last years the only thing I needed (but in the end didn't) was an Ethernet adapter for the POTP (Plain Old Twisted Pair, lol) cable.
> e.g. when commuting between home and office
Quite weird take. Sure, it's small, but...
> So you can always take a NUC with you wherever you need
Well, I prefer to be able to work on my PC, not seeking a power outlets and a place for a monitor.
I know a few people who bought an iMac because it was the easiest way to get a desktop PC at home:
- big screen
- simple setup
- lasts 10 years
They're a fantastic value if you want a trouble free PC for non-tech folks. The only sad thing is that after 10 years you are basically throwing away a perfectly fine display.
I do my day-to-day work on a Mac mini, people are losing out if they're only using them for testing purposes. They're not terribly expensive (when compared to other Apple products), really good form and volume factor, i.e. a Mini can do a lot of stuff even though is, well, not that big, plus a Mini doesn't consume all that much power, to the contrary.
They're overpriced for what you are buying. I'm not interested in paying $400 for a bare bones i5 with no ram or disk which adds another $150-200.
I bought a quad i5 nuc on sale off Newegg for $300. I also ordered parts to build a little AMD 6 core APU itx setup for 50 bucks more. If the Nuc wasn't on sale I would not have bothered to even look at it. And for 50 bucks more got waaaaay more compute power. The only reason I even bought the Nuc and not another itx was simply the very small size.
The hardkernel odroid h3 with a quad Celeron, dual 2.5 GbE and m.2 M key costs $130 without the case/PSU. Intel can do better on pricing.
I wish they had stayed out. People are talking about how they started this great market segment but mini-ITX was a real standard motherboard size started by VIA and thin mini-ITX would be more popular if Intel didn't just make whatever they wanted and set a precedent of consumer trash instead of components for this size class.
mini-itx, esp the low profile format, really should be way more popular, as you can manually upgrade it so easily yet it remains to be small in size, small but not smaller.
> BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.
The issue is, Intel's aiming more upmarket (based on their pricing) for something that doesn't offer a lot more. Intel's done interesting/fun things, such as building the entire motherboard into a single slot sized unit, but going out and buying a Beelink is a better proposition for most people.
If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded. They lead the way, they begat a new form factor, and it's won. But the market has grown much more competitive, and it's hard to see what Intel would do to remain relevant & important in this market. Their current efforts are interesting, and even good, but not really enough to clearly differentiate, not enough to command a huge lead in this market, and certainly not at the somewhat above average prices Intel has been asking.
This follows a lot of other Intel examples. Intel left DRAM market in 1985. Intel left SSDs in 2020, in a similar situation to NUCs here: they basically created the mass consumer market, by pioneering NVMe & creating amazingly high-value products that used to be ultra-expensive proprietary botique items.
This seems like a classic Innovator's Dilemna situation, of Intel having a strong hand creating mass-market products that define the industry, but then being chased out by down-market competition, once the offerings really become a true everyday commodity. I'm not sure if there even is another way Intel ought to behave here.
I completely agree with your analysis. I'm writing this on a Beelink (running aftermarket Linux) and couldn't be happier about the value proposition. I started my shopping looking for a NUC, but they were all too pricey for what I wanted/needed.
> If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded.
They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous.
> If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded.
You could spin the entire unit off so it could compete on it's own terms. There's plenty of success stories to be found this way, and Intel's habit of doing this time after time means that I have very little confidence in any new product they bring to market outside of CPU cores and view them mostly as a consumer electronics company now.
> They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous.
The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product. I think the idea is that it goes like this:
Intel: Hey everyone, we made this chip we think could be really cool in a new form factor.
OEMs: Uum, I dunno -- if that's such a cool thing, why isn't anyone else making them?
Intel: OK, I'll just make one myself. <makes NUC>
OEMs: Oh hey, people do seem to really like those NUCs. <makes things like a NUC with Intel chips>
Intel: There we go, you get the idea! <stops making NUC>
I don't know this is what happened, but at least it's a plausible definition of "success".
> The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product.
It's a mobile chipset. They're already making those. Other manufacturers also make those. A good hint here is these devices use bog standard 19V laptop power supplies.
The NUC form factor more or less already existed in the fanless industrial mini PC and HTPC markets. Intel just made it a high performance consumer product, but they also could have moved in on that industrial space and offered a solid product with good support into a space where only the Raspberry Pi and some very small scale and niche distributors exist.
They really need a products division that is outside of their core chip division. The management styles don't translate, and again, all this does is risk damaging that brand to claim a phyrric victory over a flash in the pan.
Plus.. I hate cheap plastic PCs from builders that offer zero support or longevity in their products. Intel would have had me buying fanless NUCs for years if they stayed in the space. The price difference was _well worth it_ for me.
I think its a bigger issue that the next gen NUCs will be good enough to cannibalize the rest of the desktop market. Look at the recent amd offerings and the mac mini with M1. They can replace my destop fully. The only reason I have a desktop now is for gaming.
There are some pretty interesting custom builders on YouTube such as Optimum Tech that do some fascinating custom loop compact builds and then under volt the GPU. Here is a recent one with a 4090: https://youtu.be/X0ukdo7Xx7U
Unless you are also gaming, the AI machine does not need to be your desktop. But can sit comfortably in your basement, chugging along 24/7 with no compromise adequat cooling.
Yes. I think that is a solid NUC alternative with one exception: the lack of USB4/ Thunderbolt as standard. Intel was very good about including TB on its NUC line and also did a better job upgrading to 2.5GbE.
I don't think it's the form factor, I think it's more about competing with their own customers. There are similar offerings (including AMD based) from several other vendors. I've been far more interested in the AMD based ones the past few gen... currently using a MiniForum model with a 5900HX for home server duties.
There are some great Chinese mini PCs on Amazon, many of them using Intel processors. Some of these are very compelling against ARM mini PCs such as the Raspberry Pi 400.
Absolutely... the RPi scalping over the pandemic is what turned me on to these things... There are some Intel options around $200, that include case, power and many have memory and storage. When the 8gb RPi was close to that bare board, was definitely worth switching to something materially faster.
I want to like these, but they hit the opposite of a sweet spot (sour spot? sore spot?): More expensive than a laptop (which also have a screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, etc.) and much larger than a dongle.
The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.
The dongle is not a sweet spot for anything but low power embedded IOT stuff.
Modern desktop computing takes at least 25-35W of consistent power, and there's absolutely NO way to fit that power envelope in a dongle factor, unless you surround it with a block of solid copper.
> The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.
The PC space really needs a new miniaturized case standard. The current ATX ones are too large for current components, and intel nuc is too integrated. Custom mini PC have odd things like long PCI riser cables because the ATX defined connectors are in the wrong place for mini pc builds.
We need a top-to-bottom motherboard and PSU redesign. At minimum, I would like to see something higher than 12v rails so powering GPUs was less ridiculous.
This is the main problem. I buy NUCs because I know I am going to get a machine that works and if there's anything wrong with the BIOS they will ship an update, and that update will be installable without Microsoft Windows. If I am left to a marketplace without Intel's excellent BIOS, I am going to be very sad.
Assuming I'm able to run without any obvious bugs, crashes, I don't generally run BIOS updates. That said, I can understand with a more general motherboard that may swap to a newer CPU, or other peripherals.
Given how common embedded/box PCs are (so many display boards and digital signages - at the restaurant/every kiosk, operating the dozens of automated processes we take for granted - or not, given it's HN) - I can't imagine the market not existing. Intel making poor business decisions/cost cutting, sure. But the market of box PCs is huge. And Intel is likely the best company on Earth to be able to leverage their knowledge and bring niche products to market that most companies can't even dream of designing (unless you're AMD/Apple/Nvidia - and even they don't have fab + design capabilities.)
As someone who was hoping to use a NUC as a computer/laptop, I am dissappointed in Intel.
517 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadOn the product side, Intel seems to be doubling down on GPUs, in spite of troubling rumors about Arc gen 2.
Of course the question is what will be on time and what will be delayed. Previous delays obliterated the product lineups Intel meticulously planned before.
If its not, that would be very dire, given the rumors that 20A is behind. Intel can only cancel and delay for so long.
This is the last credible rumor I know of: https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-next-gen-arc-battlemage-gp...
Nevertheless Intel did officially modify and delay Falcon Shores (their big server GPU) to 2025, which worrying.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18756/intel-scraps-rialto-bri...
Funnily enough, Intel did used to make PLDs in the 90s. And back then, Altera actually rebranded and sold them!
Intel can easily launch a new small form factor line, with a new name, next year if the market is looking good.
...but in practice I never got one, because they were always so expensive. The same hardware can be found in a laptop for much less.
For most modern computers you cannot be 100% sure about what you get for your money, until you have them in your hands and you can run tests yourself. By then, if you discover that the computer is not exactly what you want, it is too late. You cannot get your money back because the computer is not defective, it is just different from what you expected. There are helpful published product reviews, but those do not cover all products, especially not most of the cheaper versions.
In recent years, many small Chinese companies have introduced various small computers that are much more innovative than the latest Intel NUC models, but they have little or no documentation (at least in English) and they frequently have manufacturing quality problems, so the Intel NUCs will be missed.
Moreover, until now nobody has made good computers with 35 W CPUs and with a volume of less than 0.5 L or good computers with 45 W CPUs and with a volume of less than 0.7 L, except Intel. All the alternatives use either bigger cases or less powerful CPUs.
Then there was their community and RMA manager Dona. That woman had to be one of the hardest working people I've ever encountered. She must have slept like 5 hours a day. People could post on some obscure forum about a defect and she'd find the post and make it right. One time, when I was around 16 in 2007, I broke a very niche and specific overclocking record on DDR2 latency that still passed Memtest x86, and Dona hooked me the hell up. Suddenly started getting all sorts of companies sending me heatsinks, RAM, PSU's, etc to "review" if I wanted to. Sidenote to this tangent - I have to say, the ultra-fine grit sandpaper kit with 12 sheets in increasing grit, was absolutely my favorite. Learned how to sand a heatsink down to a near mirror finish and shaved a few degrees celsius off my de-capped AMD Opteron 165.
DFI BIOS were famous for exposing the most settings for regulating RAM/ CPU/ Chipset/ GPU/ SATA/ PCI-E/ IDE communication and lanes. This guide/ participating in the DFI overclocking community probably taught me more about the fundamentals of computer science, and how all those electrons move around to make the sand think. https://forums.overclockersclub.com/topic/100835-the-definit...
Fun trip down memory lane.
Fond memories of that time period, hanging out on BlazingPC and other forums. Back then my primary setup was cooled with a Vapor phase change machine if I remember right. Hummed along at about -60 Celsius under load and was super stable even at close to 5ghz I think it was. I also had a bunch of Kayl GPU & CPU pots which meant I was always chomping at the bit to do dry ice / ln2 sessions and crank out a few digits of pi. Now I have an M1 Max, how boring.
Thanks for reminding me cududa. Sounds like we may have competed for a few records back in the day
Can you give an example? Clearly you are concerned with more than just the listed specs. Do you mean like RAM and SSD models? Or even lower level than this?
The spec sheets that are provided for pre-built consumer machines will at best identify the two or three most expensive chips and give you a vague idea of what class of part they selected for up to a dozen other components. You will definitely never get the specificity of a PCPartPicker parts list. You won't be able to audit the list of components for ones that are known to be problematic for Linux use.
Apple
The 14 day return period doesn't apply to in-store purchases
(not trying to argue btw)
The volume of a Mac Mini is 1.4 L.
A Mac Mini is huge in comparison with a classic slim NUC and it has a double volume in comparison with a tall NUC or with a Skull Canyon NUC.
At the size of a Mac Mini it is trivial to cool even a 65 W CPU, because that is possible even in a smaller 1 L case.
So no, what I have said about Intel is correct.
They will be missed, I guess I'll have to look at similar devices from non-Intel in the future.
They all start to blend together really, 0%IR BS washing away and revealing who's swimming naked.
The NUCs are a bit too expensive though and plenty of x264 content still available.
Similar issue with x265 content though. I've solved that by just using Apple TVs for our two TVs—also fixes any worries about surround not outputting correctly or whatever, that you can run into with hacked-together solutions. Spendy, but they've wasted none of my time and have never not-worked. Any other devices we connect to it with (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones) all support x265, so that's a non-issue. Maybe newer Rokus support x265, IDK, but none of mine do, which is the only reason I'm not still using those as my set-top client devices.
(if you stick with Kodi, though: RPi4 supports hardware x265, I think)
https://osmc.tv/vero/
They have hardware x264 and x265 decoding, support is great too.
Comparable in what way, size?
That is, we hoped to use Intel's MFX Media SDK for transcoding h264 (or even h265) video. Unfortunately both the SDK and the hardware were too much of a moving target, going from software to hardware only, Windows only then later linux only on CentOS, then only on Ubuntu, then (partially) open source. Dropping support for older generations, breaking API changes. Opaque licensing policies.
At some point we gave up and simply went with ffmpeg. Works great on AMD too, or ARM for that matter.
Still using a NUC as main development machine, extremely fast and mostly quiet.
We've tested on Amazon's Graviton 2 and 3 systems and so-far found them to be on par or slightly cheaper than their x86-64 counterparts. But this is mostly due to AWS aggressive pricing of ARM systems, which is quite the contrary for Apple hardware.
MacMini's currently are approximately twice as expensive as the Intel i7 NUC, Gigabyte Brix and similar hardware we bought. Also, dev tools targeting server software development on Apple hardware (ie. Linux, please!) are still wanting.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer
Down market, there are way cheaper 1L business PCs which are mass produced for businesses but work great for consumers wanting small quiet (or not, 65w options also available) systems.
Up market, there's all manner of small form factor gaming PCs and others.
Intel did have a knack for having interesting twists & innovations, but they rarely were must have advantages. Building the whole PC on a card was an interesting & useful move, for their gaming Extreme series. Skull Canyon back in 2016 showed a power density and level of integration that the world didn't know had been possible. The price has always been high, too high for critical success, but I thanks Intel for pushing new things & pushing the market. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-...
Recently bought a lot of 10 Dell Optiplex Micros for around $1,200 USD all ready to go (9th gen / 16GB DDR4 / 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro) for a small business that works on spreadsheets and basic data entry all day. Replaced old desktop towers and employees were happy to have more free desk/working space.
They are only cheaper if you are buying the higher end units, and comparing them to the higher end NUC's like the Skull Canyon
If you get down into the Celeron Models and the price really can not be beat.
I have bought a TON of Celeron NUC's to run as Kioks, Signage, and other Single Application purposes, never found anything from Lenovo, Dell, etc that could beat the price
The lack of any significant IO to the outside world crippled these things massively.
I tried to order 3 NUCs once; after waiting 6 months for stock, I gave up.
Seems nothing will actually be lost.
Anybody make ANYTHING that is nuc-like and has 10G+? HP Elitedesk 800 mini has a flexio option for a single 10g port, but it's the only similar thing I have discovered.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805527368249.html
[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803996127706.html
I thought NBase-T was gonna finally save us all until Marvell bought Aquantia and they started hosing us with speed-limited variants of their chipsets. Now everyone sees a 2.5gb nic and they are stoked for the huge upgrade instead of recognizing that it's really just a crippled 10gb nic
https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case
Something like this seems nice: https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/vpn-router/er...
But I don't actually have >1Gbps service yet, and haven't needed to use my backup connection, so I have so far not taken the plunge.
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
This provides up to 4 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, plus WiFi.
The passively-cooled metal box has 2 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, but you can add another 2 ports with Ethernet USB dongles. It has a slow quadruple 2 GHz Cortex-A55 CPU, but this is still very fast in comparison with the older Raspberry Pi models and its Ethernet and USB ports are much better than those of any Raspberry Pi, allowing full speed.
The schematic of this firewall/router is public, which is good. Also, unlike for Intel or AMD CPUs, much more public documentation about the CPU is available, which makes it more trustworthy.
The RK3568 CPU has good Linux support, but even so, an ARM-based computer can be recommended only to an experienced Linux user, because many problems can appear when attempting to install and configure various programs.
For now, ARM-based computers can be recommended only when the cost of the computer, including the DRAM memory does not exceed $150.
Starting at $150 for computer + DRAM, it is possible to find computers with Intel Alder Lake N CPUs (e.g. N100, N200 or i3-N305). These are much faster than any ARM-based computer, with the exception of those that are many times more expensive (like those sold by NVIDIA, MediaTek or Qualcomm).
Of course not in stock, nothing good ever is, but someday...
> https://www.amazon.com/SENSTUN-Firewall-Appliance-Fanless-Ba...
Being that they are just PCs, you can install pfSense or whatever solution you want. They are silent and no larger than a typical network switch. If anything, the enthusiast firewall market has been well served recently - there are well over 20+ models on amazon alone right now intended for homemade firewalls or routers.
These were the perfect sweet spot for me between abusing low-end laptops and shelling out real money. My kids put them together with me and it was a nice learning experience for them, too.
I was hoping I'd be able to upgrade/replace these piecemeal as needed. I guess I'll have to look into other replacements for when these give out.
dn2820fykh was great.
A NUC with an i3 Raptor Lake CPU and 16 GB DRAM is slightly less than EUR 400, a NUC with an i7 Raptor Lake CPU and 64 GB DRAM is slightly less than EUR 800, both with all taxes included.
If you buy the cheapest MB, the cheapest case and PSU and the cheapest Pentium or Celeron desktop CPU, you can get a desktop that is cheaper than a NUC, but with less peripheral interfaces, i.e. without the Thunderbolt ports included in a NUC, and which will not be faster than a NUC.
On the other hand if you compare a NUC with a laptop that has a similar number of peripheral interfaces and a similar CPU speed, then you discover that the laptops are incredibly overpriced and only mobile workstations or top gaming laptops of $3000 or more can match a NUC.
None of the laptops available from a major vendor has so many peripheral ports as a NUC. None of the laptops that use the same CPU as a NUC has a comparable speed to the NUC. The reason is that NUCs have much better cooling. In the recent NUCs, the CPU can dissipate 35 W indefinitely, without overheating, even if the CPUs have a nominal TDP of only 28 W.
Because of this I have stopped upgrading my Dell Precision mobile workstation and I have replaced it with a NUC together with a 17" portable monitor and a compact keyboard. This combo has less than half the price of a comparable mobile workstation, it is much lighter, by more than 1 kg than a 17" laptop, it needs less volume in my backpack, and because it has more peripheral ports I carry less dongles.
I have always used my laptop on a desk, connected to the mains power, wherever I have to go in a business trip, so using a NUC changes nothing from this POV.
They ended up being bad competitions for high end gaming PCs giving you notebook like power for desktop gaming prices. I'm surprised they survived this long.
They sold over 10 million of these things.
definitely not
Those "poshy" people are quick to click on in-app purchases.
How do you know this? I personally decided against a mini when I specced one out and a MBP wound up cheaper. The pricing strategy certainly made me _feel_ like they were pushing me away from the mini.
Besides, I'd use an external display anyways, not working at caffées.
overall I feel that there is enough integration density in processors that the laptop form factors will be good enough for most common (& semi advanced) uses. so this seems like an odd decision to move out of that market (technically) but if you factor in business then it starts to makes sense.
Also, apple’s crazy profitability means they may offer something like the mini that doesn’t sell as well as their laptop, while intel is ruthlessly cutting out things that aren’t part of their core business because of their monetary issues.
If Intel can’t compete with cheaper manufacturers and its not hitting their internal required rate of return then it may no longer justify having that business unit at all.
I haven’t owned a laptop in years. I travel with my iPad pro.
1. https://www.bee-link.com/beelink-gaming-pc-gtr6900hx-1994384...
The only worries are the quality of the cooling and the noise.
According to this review:
https://www.servethehome.com/beelink-gtr7-changes-the-mini-p...
it seems that from the point of view of the cooling and noise they are significantly improved over earlier Beelink models, so any of the two variants seems like a good choice.
An alternative is Minisforum UM790, which is configured for a lower CPU power and which has slightly less peripheral interfaces.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been happy enough with mine for the price that I had already decided I would be choosing Beelink for my next mini PC over a NUC.
That said, I have seen some mixed reports of some issues around thermal throttling and eGPU support for some of the newer gaming focused ones, but I think if you have realistic expectations given the form factor (and especially if you’re not going for gaming) then they are fairly reliable and sturdy little devices.
* Also note, I bought mine barebones and added my own ram and SSD. I can’t speak to the quality of what they ship with, but I also haven’t heard any complaints from others with that regard.
Everyone has loved them. I wound up getting one to manage my print farm, and no complaints there, either. Knock on wood, but they Just Work, so far. Noise and heat have not been an issue, even with the oldest units.
ETA Prime and ServeTheHome do regular reviews of these on YouTube.
Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.
The Mac mini has always been Apple's low-cost trojan horse product for existing PC users who already have a keyboard, mouse and display. The issues with keeping it updated in the past had more to do with the Intel processors available to Apple.
In the short Apple Silicon era, the Mac mini has been upgraded multiple times. It's remains an important product.
I would make a bet that the MacBook Air outsells both the iMac and Mac mini by a ratio of 10 to 1.
Check out all the big computer manufacturers like Dell and HP. Go to their “cheap desktops” section (e.g., Dell Inspiron).
Focusing on Dell, the cheapest one I see is $499 and the specs are a 13th gen i5, Intel UHD 730, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD. Bring your own monitor!
For laptops, the Inspiron 15 for $430 gets you 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 11th gen core i5, Iris Xe graphics.
Why am I buying that desktop instead of the laptop? What is my motivation?
Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.
In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air, and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Desktops just don’t have a price advantage because nobody wants them, so there’s no economy of scale.
Yes, that's who the Mac mini is primarily targeted at--PC users that want a Mac but don't want to spend a lot of money and who have a keyboard, mouse and display.
> In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air…
It takes a lot to actually get any Apple Silicon Mac with a fan to make enough sound to actually be heard. If you read the reviews for the Mac mini, nobody has ever said fan noise was an issue because they never heard any.
> and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.
Also not accurate.
Because desktops have more room, you can get more cores (both CPU and GPU) and run them faster (and therefore hotter) than you can in a laptop. The fact the M-series chips came from the iPhone's A-series has nothing to do with performance. A $499 M2 Mac mini has 4 performance CPU cores and 8 GPU cores while a $1,199 iPhone 14 Pro Max has 2 performance CPU cores and 5 GPU cores. That's the beauty of ARM: it scales from phones to laptops to servers.
If you need more storage, you can get 8 TB in a Mac mini, while the MacBook Air maxes out at 2 TB.
The Mac mini has always been the workhorse of the Mac line and hasn't changed. Just going from Intel to ARM made the Mac mini a no-brainer replacement for the old Intel Mac Pros, which were the poster children for loud desktop computers.
I don't think the Mac mini is the workhorse or a strong seller of the Mac lineup; it's just a convenient little niche to keep around.
Regarding performance advantage: When Apple was on Intel, Intel's SKUs had way more of a wattage/thermal difference between their product lines: The 16" MacBook Pro was sucking down 100 watts while my current 14" MacBook Pro can stay charged on an iPhone charging brick.
So when you look at a Mac Mini at $600 having a handful of extra cores over a $1000 MacBook Air, it's like, "yes, it's technically faster," but not "I'm going to be able to enable new workflows with this additional performance."
If you can play a game or edit a video or browse the web on a Mac mini, you'll be able to do the exact same thing on a MacBook Air and, as a generally subjective human, not notice any difference in capability or speed. This was not the case when Apple was selling 12" MacBooks that felt miserably slow editing a Word document new out of the box.
Regarding storage: That 8TB upgrade is only available on the top-tier Mac mini, and choosing it brings you to $3699. Choose the lowest tier MacBook Pro 14" with that same storage upgrade and for $4399 and you get the exact same processor with the exact same performance (not thermally limited), and on top of that you get a 120Hz mini-LED high DPI display, keyboard, trackpad, webcam, battery, and all the convenience that a laptop gets you.
What person with nearly $4000 to spend on a system is going to choose not to have a laptop for less than 20% more money when they don't even lose even a single digit percent of performance? It's not like the Mac mini is internally expandable or upgradable at all.
"The Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup" was the phrase that stuck into everyone's mind on how Apple views it.
It’s also the exact purpose of my home mac mini
There are a lot of users who need many other peripherals besides keyboard and mouse and who prefer to not use a ton of dongles. Sometimes no dongle can help with a laptop, because the aggregate throughput of all its USB ports is just too small.
A NUC is much faster than a generic laptop which uses the same CPU, because it has much better cooling. In all recent 0.5 L NUCs the CPU can dissipate 35 W forever without overheating.
No generic laptop can do that. There are plenty of gaming laptops or mobile workstations that can match or exceed the speed of a NUC, but those cost between two and eight times more than a NUC, so a NUC or a similar SFF computer is a much better value than such a laptop and even together with a portable monitor and a compact keyboard it is easier to carry in a backpack than a big and heavy laptop. I have done this for years.
The Mini seems more specialized. I’ve bought many of them over the years for things like video installations, but I never see them in “regular people use”.
For quite some years I just said "buy a notebook and (if you really need it) monitor with keyboard/ mouse".
With an SSD and a decent amount of RAM any notebook is fine for 95% of what people want from the home computer, with a small exception of gaming with a better settings than low/middle.
At this point nor Mini, nor any other SFF 'desktop' doesn't make sense, because you can't take it with you if you need.
I think there are lots of reasons to prefer a minipc to laptop. Personally if I need a computer on the go, I use my phone. Much lighter and smaller.
I’ll probably go with a gaming desktop or a NUC sized machine and a gaming console depending on what the market looks like in a couple years.
Sure there are some shenanigans for some laptops, like refusing to power on with the lid closed, but 'uncluttered desk' is not a problem.
On the other hand, a NUC together with a 17" portable monitor and a compact keyboard weighs less than a 17" gaming computer or mobile workstation and it is easier carried in a backpack, while offering similar performance and more peripheral ports, eliminating the need to also carry dongles.
When you know that a monitor and a keyboard are available at the destination, e.g. when commuting between home and office, than carrying only the NUC is far more convenient than carrying even the thinnest and lightest laptop.
So you can always take a NUC with you wherever you need. I have done this in many business trips, as a much better alternative to carrying a big and heavy mobile workstation laptop.
My notebook has three USB ports. In the last years the only thing I needed (but in the end didn't) was an Ethernet adapter for the POTP (Plain Old Twisted Pair, lol) cable.
> e.g. when commuting between home and office
Quite weird take. Sure, it's small, but...
> So you can always take a NUC with you wherever you need
Well, I prefer to be able to work on my PC, not seeking a power outlets and a place for a monitor.
- big screen
- simple setup
- lasts 10 years
They're a fantastic value if you want a trouble free PC for non-tech folks. The only sad thing is that after 10 years you are basically throwing away a perfectly fine display.
I bought a quad i5 nuc on sale off Newegg for $300. I also ordered parts to build a little AMD 6 core APU itx setup for 50 bucks more. If the Nuc wasn't on sale I would not have bothered to even look at it. And for 50 bucks more got waaaaay more compute power. The only reason I even bought the Nuc and not another itx was simply the very small size.
The hardkernel odroid h3 with a quad Celeron, dual 2.5 GbE and m.2 M key costs $130 without the case/PSU. Intel can do better on pricing.
Lots of products here: https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/
The issue is, Intel's aiming more upmarket (based on their pricing) for something that doesn't offer a lot more. Intel's done interesting/fun things, such as building the entire motherboard into a single slot sized unit, but going out and buying a Beelink is a better proposition for most people.
If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded. They lead the way, they begat a new form factor, and it's won. But the market has grown much more competitive, and it's hard to see what Intel would do to remain relevant & important in this market. Their current efforts are interesting, and even good, but not really enough to clearly differentiate, not enough to command a huge lead in this market, and certainly not at the somewhat above average prices Intel has been asking.
This follows a lot of other Intel examples. Intel left DRAM market in 1985. Intel left SSDs in 2020, in a similar situation to NUCs here: they basically created the mass consumer market, by pioneering NVMe & creating amazingly high-value products that used to be ultra-expensive proprietary botique items.
This seems like a classic Innovator's Dilemna situation, of Intel having a strong hand creating mass-market products that define the industry, but then being chased out by down-market competition, once the offerings really become a true everyday commodity. I'm not sure if there even is another way Intel ought to behave here.
They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous.
> If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded.
You could spin the entire unit off so it could compete on it's own terms. There's plenty of success stories to be found this way, and Intel's habit of doing this time after time means that I have very little confidence in any new product they bring to market outside of CPU cores and view them mostly as a consumer electronics company now.
The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product. I think the idea is that it goes like this:
Intel: Hey everyone, we made this chip we think could be really cool in a new form factor.
OEMs: Uum, I dunno -- if that's such a cool thing, why isn't anyone else making them?
Intel: OK, I'll just make one myself. <makes NUC>
OEMs: Oh hey, people do seem to really like those NUCs. <makes things like a NUC with Intel chips>
Intel: There we go, you get the idea! <stops making NUC>
I don't know this is what happened, but at least it's a plausible definition of "success".
It's a mobile chipset. They're already making those. Other manufacturers also make those. A good hint here is these devices use bog standard 19V laptop power supplies.
The NUC form factor more or less already existed in the fanless industrial mini PC and HTPC markets. Intel just made it a high performance consumer product, but they also could have moved in on that industrial space and offered a solid product with good support into a space where only the Raspberry Pi and some very small scale and niche distributors exist.
They really need a products division that is outside of their core chip division. The management styles don't translate, and again, all this does is risk damaging that brand to claim a phyrric victory over a flash in the pan.
Plus.. I hate cheap plastic PCs from builders that offer zero support or longevity in their products. Intel would have had me buying fanless NUCs for years if they stayed in the space. The price difference was _well worth it_ for me.
The new high end application for PCs is running AIs locally.
No way you can fit a 4090 in a NUC, the GPU itself is larger than a NUC, heat dissipation requirements cannot be 'optimized' away.
The business market is still figuring out the balance between lightweight machines using the cloud and beefy desktops running locally.
Serve the Home has an entire series on small systems:
* https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
I only need iGPUs for a zippy UI, because I don't game on my work devices, and don't want to have any added noise because of a dGPU.
This might be the right move for Intel, but not for users. NUCs are awesome, cost-effective devices.
The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.
Modern desktop computing takes at least 25-35W of consistent power, and there's absolutely NO way to fit that power envelope in a dongle factor, unless you surround it with a block of solid copper.
> The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.
meh.
As someone who was hoping to use a NUC as a computer/laptop, I am dissappointed in Intel.