Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business.
> "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability.
In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger took over, they've cut RealSense, Movidius, Optane Memory, IPO'd MobileEye, and now exited the Server Systems business. The only odd-ball left are their NUC business."
If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers...
It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I'm currently typing this on a Serpent Canyon NUC though, so it's certainly bittersweet.
Sad news. NUCs could have been an excellent platform if they had tried to work a bit more on cooling.
On third-party cases, NUCs were great. But on stock cases, some models were too noisy. Still, they provided great value.
Nonetheless, I agree it's better for Intel to focus on their core business and leave this market to others. Some niche PC makers such as Cirrus7 offer great NUC-like systems.
NUC, depending on the model, had decent cooling. I've owned a few of them over the years. My Skull Canyon having been my longest desktop computer ever and always had great Linux support. Funny enough the fan on that unit was recalled and Intel happily replaced it well out of warranty. But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and harder to command a premium price because it says Intel on the box. In fact I just ordered a Topton SFF that STH recommended but was waiting until the i3-N305 was available for a new OpnSense build.
I wonder how this impacts emerging markets for Intel. If they've got no outlets to test their own product uptake and get people excited about the brand I feel like that's a missed opportunity and the cost of doing business. I saw a lot of NUC devices in data centers in the VMware hayday because they were so widely popular on TinkerTry and Virtually Gheto (i.e. William Lam) at the time.
I saw security vendors copy that play making SFF firewalls to incent stakeholders to run at home that turned into 7-figure deals over the long term.
I don't think Gelsinger is doing a lot of good for Intel. You didn't need him to cut costs. He's had plenty of time behind the wheel at this point, Intel should be on a more interesting trajectory by now.
> But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and harder to command a premium price because it says Intel on the box.
It was my impression the NUC sold by Intel was always meant to be a proof of concept for the NUC-class device to inspire third parties to make them. Intel getting out of the market now that it's proven sort of makes sense.
The Intel NUC was too successful and none of the big commercial players (Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc) ever embraced it as they basically repurpose their Laptop boards and engineering into their "tiny" and "nano" 1L platforms which function like a headless laptop.
None of these players are interested in budget systems either, which is where my attraction to NUC platform was, Celeron. None of the big players touch Celeron, they only make I3, I5, and I7 systems, all in excess of $600 ea.
I can get a Celeron intel NUC fully equipment with a Windows Lic for less than 1/2 that that is perfectly suited for Line of Business Applications, Kiosk Machines, or other Low I/O, Low Memory single Application workloads.
Things that could run on PI or other ARM SBC if not for the application stack requirement of Win32 API and the management integration of Windows (Active Directory, Intune, ConfigMgr) etc.
I see alot of comments on here about how Great the NUC linux compatibility is. Ironically the Main Reason I use Intel NUC platform in a commercial setting is because of its Windows Compatibility, something alot of the low cost, tiny form factor, SBC platforms (like Odriod, rPI, etc) lack. I require Windows for my environment unfortunately .
NUC was always a platform that exposed the latest and greatest in a small form factor. I, honestly, don't believe the form factor itself was the driver. But the ability to show off the new hardware capabilities in a cheap, small, package. People were using these things in the DC, not because of the size (in fact that was often an impediment) but the capabilities in a small footprint.
Losing this outlet for them is a loss for Intel to bring new considerations to their platform beyond just chips. Again, if Intel was looking at NUC as a profit center, surely it was smart to shut it down. But I highly doubt the NUC line was a significant revenue generator to begin with. Because that wasn't the real value add for Intel. It got people talking about Intel and using it. That is one of the greatest forms of marketing for a chip manufacturer.
Yeah, I thought that was Intel's MO. Intel quit making RealSense only after a competitor (OAK-D from Luxonis) became viable. They just want to make chips. It's my impression that they only build "lower" devices as a proof-of-concept for how their chips can be used.
If Intel had 'worked more on [thermals]' we probably wouldn't have the M2 chip.
At nearly every phase of Intel's history they've had the second-worst chips for instructions per watt, occasionally taking over first place.
In a world where a large and ever-growing percentage of all CPUs are not fronted by giant cooling fans... It's like Intel decided what they wanted on their tombstone in 1995 and haven't felt the need to change it since.
Things like the Dell Optiplex Micro and Lenovo Mini ThinkCenters can provide a similar experience. Generally I have found that they haven't had any major noise issues but a part of that was being very conservative with clock rates.
NUC isn't exactly the same as those, it is designed to be much more user upgradable and the price was very competitive. But even nowadays it is surprising to see them in the wild because they just aren't that common.
I bought the Intel Euclid (basically a Realsense with integrated compute) and out of the box it had a fan curve that would cause it to thermal throttle within 5 minutes, which would also cause the wifi to drop out.
On a regular consumer device you pick a tradeoff that will make it quieter, but really the only thing anyone used the Euclid for was robotics, where if you're using the CPU at all it's to run SLAM or object recognition nets, in which case you need 100% of the performance 100% of the time...
I've been running a NUC7 for several years and the onboard fan has failed four times now.
Replacing it is a 15 minute job, but the timing is always terrible.
Now I have an alert set for when the CPU is heavily thermal throttling or when the temp sensors hit certain thresholds and I keep a spare fan on hands at all time.
The "NUC" was actually an Intel developed form factor, smaller than Micro ATX. They had to engineer motherboards, power supplies, and cooling for the extremely small footprint. They were available as barebones kits (without a CPU), so literally the exact opposite of what you suggest.
My 2018 i7 begs to differ. The cooling was never adequate enough for that chip even at 65W.
Now it’s comically overpowered. For 25-35W TDPs the chassis is fine, but Intel couldn’t deliver performance there. Apple should have retooled the case, not slapped it in there anyways. At one point when I had to use that i7 everyday I debated if it would be worth it to hack a proper PC tower cooler onto it and operate it outside the case.
I always saw the NUCs as proof of concept for small form factor PCs and to that end I think they have succeeded. There are a ton of different form factors now.
Didn’t Intel used to be pretty up front that the NUC was a way to push computer manufacturers to be more innovative? Sort of like a widely available reference computer.
By making them without RAM and SSD they were never going to be that profitable. It was nice being able to buy boxes without wasted parts you knew you didn’t want.
The probably is that the amd apu is just better and more balanced now. You get lower tdp + better graphic cards. So ppl would just buy the amd counter part
Nooooo! This is a tragedy. I love my NUC. It's totally handy to have a little computer on my desk to load up with whatever Linux distro I please and play around. NUC is way better than Raspberry PI.
Isn’t this basically the innovator’s dilemma? You can call it focusing the core business, but you can also call it dropping investment in long term cash flows.
The dilemma is when you have tech A: Profitable and large. Tech B: Unprofitable and small, but the tech itself improves at a faster rate than tech A.
GPUs were their true dilemma. GPUs were only good for gamers, who are picky and extremely value sensitive. Whereas CPUs could be sold to datacenters and enterprises, very high profit margins. Hence CPUs were core at intel, no one has the balls to bet on GPUs and go all in.
But CPUs ran out of performance improvements, GPUs continue to scale up because of parallelism.
Then suddenly, new valuable applications started to be based on GPUs, first Crypto, now AI. Now CPUs are completely commoditized, and Nvidia dominates the money-printing GPU market, and worth 8x of intel.
NUCs are not some rapidly improving tech, they are just some minor market that is profitable but never that large.
The NUC was never going to be a mass market product.
Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t
And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.
It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to get to where the M2 chip is today (including acquisitions) - but it only exists today all because of the A-series SoC in the iPhone: without the iPhone Apple would likely be still dependent on Intel for Mac chips.
The iPhone isn’t going away any time soon - but when/if that day comes, Apple is going to be faced with having to maintain all those iPhone-originated projects with no easy way to walk them down (e.g. switching from Apple Silicon back to Intel - or stock ARM - is going to damage Apple’s credibility for years). I’m concerned Apple might be painting themselves into a corner by continuing to shed businesses it isn’t interested in that might be a useful lifeline in a post-iPhone world, like their XServe hardware - or even their MacPro workstations: Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types - while at the high-end (movies, etc) the great migration from FCP-on-Mac to Avid-on-Windows took place almost a decade ago - and the lack of PCI-Ex GPUs in the 2023 M2 MacPro is further evidence, to me at-least, that Apple is increasingly uninterested in the Workstation market - which leaves them with less access to trend-setting professionals - which erodes their ability to compete, long-term, imo.
Intel killing-off the NUC is unfortunate, but ultimately is not Intel’s core business (chipmaking) which remains their priority. I don’t blame Intel for doing that; but it would be the same thing if Apple killed-off their Mac Studio line (they even look-alike): it isn’t their (current) core-business - but as Apple sheds - or neglects - its old core-businesses (i.e. computers) it leaves them with fewer contingency options.
> Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types
I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case.
But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
I think you're right that Apple has lost a lot of creative professionals over the years who migrated to Windows, and the lack of plug and play GPUs may well keep some of those professionals away.
But I think it's actually precisely the indies that represent Apple's best chance at making inroads into the space again over the long run. If you're a kid trying to bootstrap a new YouTube channel or experimenting with filmography and building a portfolio, it's hard to recommend a better combo than FCP and a Mac Mini for performance and cost.
Except that the bottom end is severly hamstrung for "creators" with just 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage at half performance. Fix both and you are at $1000+ for the Mac mini; even worse in non-$ currencies, e.g. 1150€.
The performance of that one is good and great for stuff like video editing, but it is also double the price.
Side note: minisforum um790 with a current amd laptop chip seems to be competitive with an m2 pro (similar power and efficiency under load, somewhat worse idle) and you can even get 64gb of ram while still being much cheaper than the Mac mini. Q: What are the cheapest macs with 32gb of ram? With 64gb?
The half rate SSD at the entry point is unfortunate, but it takes the SSD performance from great to just fine. I wouldn't call it a deal breaker, especially at the price-point. If you can't splurge a little higher, you'll be ok.
Really, getting the insanely good media encode engines built into the silicon is the point for a small indie creative shop (which is what we're talking about here). The rest of the M1/2 chip is just gravy for them.
That still leaves the ram upgrade and thus 929€ at the current apple store price for 16gb ram, 256gb storage, 1 gbit ethernet. Which again, is an okay deal for a large sized nuc, but at $1000 that is about par for the course.
Again, we're talking about entry level creators. I have been talking purely about the entry level models this whole time. I know what they come with. I know the specs, the upsides, and the downsides.
The entry-level models are great. The best entry-level machines Apple has ever offered. They would slot into any indie-creators workflow very well.
Would I recommend some upgrades if they can afford them? Yes. Some more RAM and more SSD is always a good idea. If they can't afford it? That's fine, the base models are fantastic.
Agree to disagree. Even for "entry level creators" the 8gb ram is a dealbreaker in my view. That ups the effective base price to 900€. Again very good machine, but no surprise that 900€ gets you a good device.
The experience of a low-end memory mac configuration is mostly ok, but lots of people are used to comparing storage and memory directly and have the impression you get 'less for more' when shopping Apple.
In a sense, that's true when you're using badly written non-native software (Slack, Teams, anything Java based ;) ) and you really should try out if your apps fit or upgrade right away. But even an 8Gb mac will happily run iMovie, Garageband etc for a student project or hobby use.
> lots of people are used to comparing storage and memory directly and have the impression you get 'less for more' when shopping Apple.
Yeah, I feel like most people in these conversations are sort of in "grocery store mode" -- sitting in an aisle comparing the ingredients of one jar of mayo versus another jar of mayo from a competing brand.
It's just not that simple anymore with Apple's new SoCs. What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.
I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.
Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.
> What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.
The future that fusion-HSA promised is finally here. Everyone drools over the possibility of PCs getting console-like zero-copy shared memory between the various accelerators, and people want analogous features to be ported onto the current dGPU/CPU paradigm (like directstorage). Fusion-HSA never got there itself, otherwise iGPUs would be able to do zero-copy already, but Apple has done it and the silence is thunderous.
Nobody cares, everyone is just waiting for AMD to implement something competitive and then it'll be cool. Strix Point/Strix Halo I guess.
PC enthusiasts are gonna hate this but I don't think you'll ever be able to really get to a high-performance APU without some kind of soldered memory. Consoles use soldered memory too. GDDR6 vs stacked LPDDR5X is a design call but both are clearly superior to socketed memory, you'd need an Epyc-sized socket to get an equivalent amount of memory bandwidth into an APU, and it'd pull an enormous amount of power for PHYs too. You'd probably end up with like 30w of idle power lol, meanwhile Apple is doing 25W for the whole chip. Crazy stuff.
The practical way that x86 is going to get there is what AMD is doing with Strix/Strix Halo and Intel is doing with Adamantine - you have to go to stacked cache to make up for the lack of memory bandwidth (and perhaps even still go to quad-channel like Strix Halo), and it's still going to use a lot more silicon (expensive!) and use a lot more power than just stacking some LPDDR5X on there and calling it a day. You can't get to 6-8 channels worth of bandwidth from 2 actual channels without some kind of a hack, either you run the pins super fast (GDDR6) or you move the channels on top of the package (LPDDR5X), and both of those need to be soldered. And that's a large part of why consoles and Apple Silicon can deliver a relatively large punch (3060 perf with a good CPU at 25W package power is nothing to sneeze at!) at consumer-friendly prices.
Low-end dGPUs are done for until stacking gets common, but APUs and low-end dGPUs are such an amazing impedence-match for stacking and people can't see it because it says Apple on the box instead of AMD. It grinds me when people ignore or shit-talk really cool advancements in tech just because it doesn't fit their mold or their brand, this is what everyone has been waiting 10 years for.
> I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.
To be fair, some of this is the fact that it's *nix. If you run Linux on your Intel machines it'll be snappier than windows too, my 5700G SFF build is a crazy machine for linux. But honestly having a well-supported *nix ecosystem with first-class vendor support is a good value offering, I think that's why Apple is having a surprising renaissance with computer-touchers right now. Non-techies get the happy bubble OS, techies get something they can drill down to the terminal and do their thing with dotfiles/zshrc. And everyone likes the fact that they're a well-built laptop with incredible battery life and good performance while mobile.
> Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.
I agree with both you and the commenters you're responding to. If the entry-level models will work for your needs, they're value champs. You will not find a similar value offering to a mac mini at the $400 edu pricing for example, if your use-case fits into 8GB/256GB it blows away anything else at that price point. Often there are some deals at bigbox stores or electronics retailers (B+H, Best Buy, Costco, etc) that offer some decent prices on the higher range stuff as well. A loaded-out M1 Max 16" (MK233LL/A) is $3300 on B+H right now (and it was $3200 a couple weeks ago) and you can find 32GB/1TB manufacturer refurb (applecare-eligible) M1 MBPs on Woot pretty regularly. The refurb store also allows you a lot of the flexibility of custom configuration but especially when combined with the edu/veteran discounts it gets you close to the level of that bigbox or refurb pricing. M1 Max 10C/24C with 64GB/1TB is about $2550 for example, that's a pretty nice machine too.
I would really say that if you're a developer you probably do want at least 1TB storage. A lot of things rely on being able to store docker images/pipenvs/node packages/etc in the expected place, and while I'm sure you can configure them to run on an external, it's a pain, and they aren't configured to "float away to the cloud" like apple does with their first-party apps. A 256gb spec is a thin client/cloud terminal only - used 16GB/256GB MBAs are very very cheap compared to the higher models and I have to think some of it is because people try it and learn the hard way 256GB isn't enough for them. This includes me, and while I could never have gotten to "yes" on a loaded MBP or even a 512GB or 1TB upgrade on the MBA, 16/256 definitely did not work the way I'd hoped even as a homebody with a NAS. They really are aimed at momputers and people deeply into the icloud ecosystem where everything can be silently swapped out on-demand.
That said I definitely do feel the complaint others are making that Apple basically does "product tiering by RAM/storage envy", as I once heard someone call it. Really the difference between a MBA and a MBP or between the different chassis sizes is pretty minimal when you equalize for RAM/storage, a decently loaded 15" MBA is at least $1600 and probably closer to $2k, and that also gets you an entry-level MBP or a refurb loaded (32GB/1TB) MBP. $2k for a laptop is a lot but nobody else has the kind of laptop performance and battery life that Apple does right now, so it's kind of a question of whether you're just looking for the cheapest thing that checks the boxes or if you're looking at the offering holistically. Nothing wrong with an XPS or a Latitude or Thinkpad or whatever either, but if you're spending "premium ultrabook/business laptop/gaming laptop with dGPU money" you can definitely get a real nice macbook too and it both has unique selling points and targets a different set of needs.
And Apple has perfected the art of stacking their tiers perfectly so that you can talk yourself into getting the next higher model. That's why they're the most valuable company on the planet, lol.
> But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
The frustrating thing is just how quickly value decays with Apple's pricing strategy.
When it comes to the Mac Mini/Studio, outside of some extremely niche applications, it really only makes sense to get base models. It is infuriating how much Apple charges for additional ram.
Yeah, I can agree with you that Apple's general pricing ladder is annoying.
But I'll also say as a software engineer, the MacBook Pro 16 with an M1 Max is the best tool I've ever used for my work.
I dock into a thunderbolt setup with a couple high resolution monitors. I have docker running. Often multiple IDE instances with large codebases. Multiple Chrome windows with dozens if not hundreds of tabs. Zoom calls running screen shares. The machine barely gets warm and I never hear the fans. My prior work laptops would have been howling and begging for mercy.
I often forget that I leave applications running, only to remember later "maybe you should kill those processes". With past work machines, I'd routinely have to hunt for processes to kill to claw back CPU cycles and quiet down the spinning fans.
And then I unplug it from the dock and do all of this at the airport for a few hours. Still silent, cool, and performant. I've never seen anything like it before. And while it's not "thin and light" it's also not the heaviest workstation quality laptop I've ever used.
Not sure how this fits into your personal value propositions, but I can tell you I'd pay far more than I did for this quality of a machine.
> I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case.
Yes, of course - but historically Apple's MacPros (and G3, G4, and G5 PowerMacs before that) had a fairly reasonable entry-prices - but in recent years (especially since 2013) the entry-price of Apple's workstation-tier machines has risen sharply over inflation:
In 2005, Apple advertised[1] the PowerMac G5 for sale at $1999 - adjusted for inflation that's $3100 today, but today's equivalent: the MacPro, sells at an eyewatering $6,999[2]. While in 2013, that $1999 adjusted-for-inflation would be $2400 but the 2013 "trashcan" MacPro started at $3000. Today that would be $3900 - which itself is roughly half the current $6999.
As with the Vision Pro, Apple's pricing is intended to limit demand which accomodates Apple's low-volume, US-domestic manufacturing of the Mac Pro (and everyone else can just get an iMac Pro or Mac Studio) - but this risks making Apple's workstation-class machines so inaccessible they never develop an audience, and the companies that write software for workstation-scenarios (oil-and-gas? AutoDesk? etc) will likely avoid the hassle of porting Win32 or *nix number-crunching software to Apple's hardware. Overall, it feels like Apple is trying to contrive and stage-manage their own workstation swansong - it will be beautiful, but is it wise?
> today's equivalent: the MacPro, sells at an eyewatering $6,999[2].
Others have already called you out on this, but are you being intentionally misleading to bolster your point, or just unaware of the Mac Studio's configuration options versus the Mac Pro?
The Mac Studio is effectively the new Pro. It has literally the same chip (Ultra) as the Pro for thousands of dollars less, and also offers another still very performant configuration (Max) for even less money. The Pro now only serves a very small niche that needs PCIe.
If you were to use the Mac Studio in your price comparisons, your point basically evaporates.
That’s because most people who bought these machines 20 years ago now just buy laptops which are perfectly sufficient for their use cases.
Even if there was a 3000-400 desktop Mac Pro I doubt many people would buy it instead of a MBP.
If you need a laptop anyway what’s the point of getting an another machine which is just marginally faster? That wasn’t really the case 10-20 years ago when laptops weren’t really an option as a primary machine for demanding use cases.
> If you need a laptop anyway what’s the point of getting an another machine which is just marginally faster? That wasn’t really the case 10-20 years ago when laptops weren’t really an option as a primary machine for demanding use cases.
Laptops, even those marketed as "mobile workstations", really can't compete with a proper desktop-experience - yes, a docking-station goes a long way with replicating connectivity options, but (in my life, at least) there's far too many qualiatative and quantiatative benefits to having a "proper" desktop for dev.
----
A major point for me is that I treat my laptops and portables as though they could/will go missing the next day - which means I'm careful to avoid putting irreplacable data on my laptop (and have Bitlocker enabled, which does noticably impact disk IO, even today) - whereas my desktop is a different, and a more trusted, environment. I'm not going to compromise my daily computing experience by using a throwaway-ish environment.
> Laptops, even those marketed as "mobile workstations", really can't compete with a proper desktop-experience
But that's what I've found remarkable about the MacBook Pro 16 with the M1 Max. It absolutely does replicate a desktop computing experience with smooth performance... and it does it even on battery power. As I said in my other post I've just never seen anything like it. It's beyond benchmarks to have an experience that just never hiccups or stalls on a laptop.
> A major point for me is that I treat my laptops and portables as though they could/will go missing the next day
You might need to recognize that you're the outlier in these conversations, then. The world has largely moved to laptops. Only those that truly need a desktop are issued one these days (and again, with the Max / Pro chips, even the need should be called into question for most use cases). Especially with hybrid work policies, I can't really imagine any modern corporate office issuing you a big old tower on your first day.
Honestly, I don't know - but I'm not willing to bet either way: don't forget there's a _huge_ contingent of people at companies of all sizes that figured out VBA in Office by themselves and write software internally at work who don't identify with us, the HN fringe, who only code in the office, on a company-provided desktop.
I've only ever seen (and experienced first-hand) software companies and startups issuing laptops as-standard instead of desktops twice in my whole career, all other companies I've either worked for, or worked with, preferred desktops.
At my current company we interface with a lot of independent contractors and I have noticed that exclusive laptop use is far more common there - but it's still at-odds with my own personal experience.
I would say the entry level workstation line today is Mac Studio (starting at $1999), not Mac Pro, which is strictly top end. The $6999 model of today is not equivalent to the old entry models in any way, unless you just go by bulkiness.
Why "not equivalent"? Both are top-tier workstation options of their times.
But... the UX of PowerMac G5 is lot more pleasant and everything feels lot more responsive than on modern Pros. Probably because of lack of signature verifications, SIP, RPC with Apple servers. But still, those machines _feel_ better.
The Mac pro is just a Mac studio with a "PCI express expansion chassis" bolted on which is of no use to most people. The price says Apple doesn't want to sell a lot of those machines, they probably only fitted a M2 CPU in an old Mac pro chassis to tick off the 'entire range migrated to Apple silicon' promise.
> But... the UX on PowerMac G5 is lot more pleasant and everything feels lot more responsive
Heh, that reminds me of when a friend of mine invited me over to show-off his hand-restored Mac (early-1990s-ish - I think it was a Performa 520 or 575?) and despite the lack of double-buffered graphics there were hardly any painting artifacts but the most striking thing was just how smooth and responsive everything felt - obviously the fact it's a CRT helps a lot.
When the world moved away from computer CRTs to TFTs we also went from 70-85Hz to 60Hz everywhere - and I swear I definitely can "feel" 60Hz vs. 85Hz - so I'm looking forward to monitors gradually shifting towards 120Hz or 144Hz (or higher?) because that definitely helps with responsiveness and snappiness, even with double-buffering and desktop composition.
> indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
Not with 8GB of RAM and Intel and AMD had caught up with performance per dollar. Apple is mainly competing on performance per thickness/battery life/fan volume which are still huge selling points.
The one major flaw I would like to point out here. Don't look at development on apple silicon as only development on Apple silicon. They base the architecture off their A-series processors in their phones, but scaled up. So all the research money for Apple Silicon is also research money for their in house A-series processors for their phones.
> And if Apple “fails” with “trendsetting professionals” which is only a tiny market and the Mac itself is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, does it matter?
Only in that Apple would need a platform to develop for iOS. But at that future Mac failure point that dev platform would just be iPadOS or something. I would be disappointed if Macs went away, Windows is garbage and no Linux desktop experience is as good (for me) as the Mac's but Apple wouldn't really notice in terms of revenue.
However I don't think there's any foreseeable reason for the Mac to go away. Most of the Apple's development effort is shared between macOS and iOS with even more iOS things being ported to the Mac side. Even hardware development is shared between the platforms and will be shared with the Vision platform. Even with 10% of the company's revenues the Mac is nowhere near 10% of Apple's OpEx so it definitely makes more money than it costs to develop and maintain.
As an ex-Appler I'm a bit biased as well. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1 and Windows 8 was the last straw for me.
The Windows 8 UI was schizophrenic and a lot of effort was made to force you to use the newest most broken UI. I even got a touch capable laptop and could rarely use just Metro/Modern apps because they were crippled but the classic UI is just unusable with touch. I could only comfortably use Windows 8 with the third party Classic Shell and avoiding and Metro UI app.
Windows 10 walked some of those missteps back but then became incredibly infuriating with its automatic updates. I tend to leave machines running for weeks or months, sometimes asleep and other times not. Despite me telling Windows to not do updates automatically I'll come back to a machine sitting at the user login window. All my context now gone.
Or more fun Windows having updated in the background and I shut down or reboot without realizing. Depending on the updates I have to wait some unbounded length of time just to use the system again.
Windows sleep support is also still atrocious on most machines I've used. My MacBook I can put to sleep and remove the charger and leave it for a week and it'll have battery left to do work. My Windows work laptop I left asleep but unplugged and the battery was dead after a couple hours.
That's all on top of UI/UX issues I don't like because I've been using OSX for over twenty years. Mac keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are second nature to me now and using Windows is jarring. Ctrl as a modifier key is unergonomic vs the Command key. Windows' trackpad gestures, especially app switching, are uncomfortable. All of the UI fades and pop-up previews are too distracting and there's rarely a safe place to park your cursor to read something. Everything wants to face in some tooltip or context toolbar under the cursor.
I'm fine if people like Windows but for me it's just frustrating to use. Unfortunately my work laptop is Windows now and I'm constantly annoyed with its UX problems.
In a way it would be logical for Apple to get out of the computer business and scrap all MacBooks and Mac Minis. That they only have around 10% of the market means that most people uses iPhones with non-Apple computers anyway. They could focus on making that experience even better.
> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers.
That is true, but they're already a decade into shipping NUCs. Maybe it wasn't a problem after all. It could also be just a move to show the stock market that they focus on getting leaner.
You can then argue that they've spent the last decade slipping into irrelevance, so perhaps the NUC focus was a distraction from their core issues. They're at an inflection point in the company where either they turn the ship around and successfully become the second largest foundry, closing their technology gap with TSMC, or they continue losing market share. They can't fund new fabs and new nodes without a massive reduction in their cost center.
Depends on the portfolio and strategy, but personally I think Intel is a Buy. They're burning money building new fabs with little indication that they can execute on their node or product roadmaps, but they've really took a chunk out of their cost-centre to the point where even during one of their worst quarters in the last 30+ years in terms of sales, they're still turning a profit. The Saphire Rapids Xeon is out finally out and making money after 3+ years of delays. The client products are the best they've looked in 15 years. They've got some big customers lined up for IFS. Considering the market was happy to price them at ~$64 just two years ago without all that information, makes me believe $33 is a poor market for where they're at. That's near enough their asset price.
A bit off mark on networking, looking at Tofino there. Could have maybe left barefoot alone, but no, buy it, hype it, actually tape out and start delivering nextgen, then cancel before people rack them.
With regards to Tofino, I think they've looked at the portfolio and realized they can fill that niche with their FPGA products. Looks like they've stripped out all the useful IP from Barefoot and repackaged it to be used on a Stratix/Agilex chips, or as tiles on their other devices.
I didn't want to be a pain, but I'm still waiting on a 200G (QSFP56) 400G (QSFP-DD or QSFP112) Ethernet NIC and some kind of user-programmable (and no FPGA isn't a panacea here for many reasons) packet pipelining. Connect-X (from 5 onward) is king there and of course it's all closed. You also get Broadcom stuff there. But no Intel.
The real interesting part of the Tofino line was the advent of P4, for smart network switch and eventually some processing in network, scatter-gather support or all-reduce. Some competition for nvswitches but on standard Ethernet for example.
It's worse than that. We built Tofino powered boxes. We have multiple paying customers who bought and deployed them. Intel then cancelled it, screwing us and our customers.
As an everyday user of an Intel Compute Stick I can empathize with this.
I think you're wrong about the Intel portfolio though; Arc GPUs are another line that is going to be unceremoniously cut in a few years.
I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers. Xe GPUs are going a different direction from consumer Arc GPUs already anyways.
> I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers.
That's the same strategy AMD has tried with ROCm (de-facto pro-only compute ecosystem) and it hasn't worked. Nobody is going to buy a $5000 accelerator card (or even rent AWS time) just to tinker with your ecosystem unless it's already known to be the bees' knees. NVIDIA built their success by making sure their cards were the first thing people reached for when they wanted to build a high-performance application on a compute accelerator.
Further, there's a lot of redundant work and overlapping lines of business here. You have to develop game drivers for the iGPU for anyone to take you seriously, so at that point why not make the dGPU cards and increase the ROI multiplier of your work? Or are you planning on outsourcing the whole shebang and just licensing a hardware SIP core and a driver stack? There's really only two other names with a credible Windows/Linux driver stack... NVIDIA and AMD. Imagination/PowerVR don't have any windows presence, and Intel already tried this back in the early Atom era and it fucking sucked.
Like yea you've actually pointed out the exact reason they won't cut it: Hopper or MI300 is where the HPC and performance-compute segments are going and you can't be credible in that space without an internal solution for the accelerator half. It doesn't have to be GPUs, or they don't need to have graphics pipelines, but once you are doing all the work to develop the GPGPU side, you might as well make a variant with a pixel pipeline and display outputs and sell it to enthusiasts too.
The semiconductor space has a lot of these overlaps in product verticals, and if you choose not to be in them, you're leaving revenue on the table that is relatively "cheap" to access. The same CPU uarchs that work in enterprise work in consumer, and in the grand scheme of things re-using the same uarch for a low-margin product is fine. You'd never pay to develop the product from scratch just for the consumer market, but once you've done the work, you might as well sell it to consumers too. If you're doing consumer, you probably want to be doing laptop too, but those need iGPUs. Which need drivers, and if you're doing drivers you might as well do dGPUs too.
Intel doesn't need to be exactly AMD, but AMD has gone through this and already cut to the bone on everything they didn't need. You can draw a circle around the product verticals they're in and they've pretty much identified the core business requirements for the CPU/GPU markets.
You're right though that Gelsinger is obviously stripping the business down to his own vision of those essentials. I just think right now the evidence indicates that GPUs are still a part of that vision. You can't be competitive in HPC without GPGPU, you can't do laptop without iGPU, they might as well do gaming GPUs too, especially since a lot of the GPGPU research will overlap. The drivers don't, but you have to do them for iGPU anyway for laptops.
The fabs are the rough one though. They're expensive as shit, but all intel's legacy IP uses them, and the only thing the fabs run is Intel's IP. I think he's serious about building the wall between IP and fab at intel, and about bringing in external business, but right now there is no hope of even a GloFo-style spinoff working. It would absolutely take down both halves of the company to even try.
He's definitely got a tough road, Intel's pain is only just beginning and it's going to be a long time to profitability.
I just said that as joke; you couldn't get me into finance unless you had a gun to my head. I do think long though, Intel makes for an interesting investment. It plays in about the 70th percentile for stock volatility for the year, which for a name like Intel is quite surprising. Analysts put it somewhere between -50% and +100% by this time next year. I've read of hedge funds making big bets on way smaller spreads than that. They're 25% YTD, so it's by know means "nothing".
> They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise.
I once talked to an AMD engineer and asked why they didn't just build a barebones NAS chassis with some of their ryzen embedded stuff since Ryzen is quite popular but there's very few Ryzen products in that segment. Obviously QNAP and Synology have some decent demand. That's basically what they said, didn't want to compete with customers.
GPUs are sort of the opposite example where I don't really feel any particular attachment to MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, PowerColor, etc. EVGA and Sapphire are the only ones that have managed to claw together some consumer mindshare through their warranties. But the rest are essentially customizing an AMD/NVIDIA reference design PCB and a cooler that's perfectly forgettable and interchangeable with any other offering in their price class. They're not even allowed to do double VRAM configs anymore because that would cut into Radeon Pro and Quadro revenue etc. In that scenario I don't see a lot of value to having another middleman taking a 10% cut, and to me the value of products being available at MSRP, with no diffusion of blame through the supply chain, would be worth losing the partners over.
And while systems integration (NUCs, servers, etc) are clearly something where there's a lot of value from this kind of diversity, motherboards really are not. AMD and Intel have both killed off third-party chipsets like nForce, Abit, etc, and locked everything down to their one ecosystem they control, much like GPUs. It's not quite as pronounced as GPUs, and previously there was a lot of diversity in features, but PCIe 5.0 motherboards tend to reverse this, almost every board has exactly 2 PCIe slots and more or less the exact same featureset elsewhere. And the trend is towards more and more being onboard the CPU itself anyway (AMD chips the chipset is literally just an IO expander and is completely uninvolved in management tasks) and once onboard voltage regulators (FIVR, DLVR, etc) really start to take off in the next 10-15 years the motherboard is only going to become dumber and dumber. And in that world there's less and less of a need for a partner anyway - the CPU is all self-contained and locked down anyway, partners can't experiment and do cool things, they are a dumb pipe that pumps in 2V for the DLVR to step down at point-of-use. So why pay a 10% margin for their "value-add"?
It slays me that AMD is talking a big game about "open platform" and everyone is still locking down third-party chipsets and even the Platform Lock. If you want to lock the chip to the board for security, fine, but locking it to the brand doesn't do anything except ruin the secondhand market. Oh no I have to swap it out with another lenovo chip if I steal it, what exactly does that accomplish? And if you accept the conceit of the PSP there's no reason it has to be permanent anyway, you can allow the PSP to unlock it instead of permanently blowing e-fuses. And again, third-party chipsets are where a ton of innovation happened, it's better for the market if third parties can make those double-VRAM models and undercut AMD/NVIDIA's ridiculous margins on those workstation products, or shanghai a Celeron 300A into being a dual-socket system like Abit. What we have right now is tivoization in support of product segmentation, branded as a "security feature".
also to be clear, management engine is far far worse. the chipset boots the chip for Intel, Ryzen is a SOC always. For intel, it's super intimately involved with the processor bringup in ways that can't be exposed to third parties anymore. They literally can't open anything while the ME is on the chipset, but they're flailing at homeostasis let alone big rearchs of their processor's brainstem against the possibility of third-party control of the bringup.
The chipset is a pure IO expander for AMD. AMD still is doing way better at that, it's just things like X300 ("the chipset is no chipset") being restricted to industrial/embedded, or board partners not being allowed to pursue things they want that break AMD's segmentation. PCIe 4 enablement (including opt-in) on select X370/X470 boards was something partners wanted for example. And there was no technical reason for X399/TRX40 to be segmented and even WRX80 could have been shoehorned on with "everything works just not optimally" level compatibility backwards and forwards. Partners could have done that if it wasn't denied/locked out. They did it on the Socket SP3 flavor.
Partners should ideally just get the freedom to play, and if they can make something work, cool. Let's have more Asrock/Asrock Rack and ICY DOCK design shenanigans again. Clamshell VRAM cards should be sold relatively close to actual cost rather than being gated by both AMD and NVIDIA. Etc. Partners should have the ability to configure the product in any way the product could reasonably be engineered to work. If features are being explicitly segmented by product tier it should be enforced by e-fuse feature-fusing at launch and that's the deal, no taking AVX-512 out after it launched.
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.
I've bought many NUCs over the years. I'm literally sitting in my office right now with 8 NUCs set up -- 1 as a workstation, and 7 as servers performing various tasks. I know people have always complained that they are a bit more expensive than the alternatives, but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability.
That said, I've been expecting this for quite some time. I doubt the NUC line made a lot of money for them -- their stated goal with NUC was for these machines to be demonstrations of what can be done with their hardware. In their current situation, I'm not surprised that they decided this was needed to increase their focus.
I guess I'll be shopping around for alternatives at some point.
>but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability.
Yeah it is quite strange. Even the Vision Five 2 RISC-V has better software support than your usual ARM SBC. The big caveat is that the opensource drivers only support Vulkan but Imagination ™ has planned on releasing a Vulkan based OpenGL implementation. Of course application software support is worse than ARM because of recompilation but that is a trivial barrier. If the hardware is any good, distros and developers will compile their packages for the new ISA.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
$#@! Intel NUCs were great small boxes with excellent Linux support (the only thing that doesn't work in Linux - custom fan control). In retrospect, NUCs were always the red-headed stepchild for Intel, last to get processor availability, so may that should have been expected.
System76 makes a similar sized unit called the Meerkat though I’m not sure how much it compares in other specs besides runs Linux and size. https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There are other SFF PCs available which were more competitively priced than NUCs to start with: Minisforum and Geekom are two popular brands I've used. There are also various SFF desktop PCs from major manufacturers like HP EliteDesk Mini which can be found dirt cheap at corporate auctions.
I have an Intel 11th-gen/Tiger Lake Geekom IT11 running as my "home server" with Frigate, HomeAssistant, and so on. It works great, and using OpenVINO for object detection inference and QuickSync for video leaves a ton of headroom for other uses too. The only disadvantage to these, which was shared by NUCs, is that you need to use Thunderbolt for >Gbit Ethernet connectivity.
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.
So this is just another OEM market that Intel does not want to be an OEM in and for Mini Desktop PCs that for the Most part Utilize BGA Packaged "Mobile" Processors. And BeeLink and Minisforum/others do have Intel Based Options and have sometimes even used the NUC/NUC "Canyon" branding for those OEMs' Intel processor based options.
So maybe Intel can Keep the NUC Branding around for its Mini desktop PC OEM Partners to utilize and even some of that NUC "Canyon" IP that Intel has developed can be lent to Intel's OEM partners there to make use of ODM to OEM Style in any Intel based offerings from any OEM partners there.
AMD's made a lot of headway there with its Ryzen APUs in Minisforum/BeeLink Mini desktop PCs but that's more because of the Integrated Graphics than any x86 CPU cores. And now there are Ryzen 7040 series Mini Desktop PCs from BeeLink/Minisforum using those "Mobile" Ryzen BGA packaged APU variants that have been allotted 65W cTDPs by the OEMs and that's the same cTDP(65W) that used to be only allocated for the Socket Packaged Ryzen G Series desktop APUs that are more DIY friendly there than BGA Packaged APUs.
So OEMs will take over there for Intel and Intel can offer them the same Engineering In Kind sort of Assistance that Intel offers its Laptop OEM Partners there and Intel actually becomes a Laptop ODM of sorts to the Laptop OEMs where Intel designs a reference laptop at Intel's expense(ODM Style) for the Laptop OEMs to take that design and rebrand that as their own with minor value added additions for market segmentation there to sell to consumers. So Intel is no longer a NUC OEM directly but has given that over entirely to the Intel NUC OEM partners there just like on Intel processor based OEM laptops.
Shame, I love NUCs, I have several. They always felt like high quality, energy efficient, silent and quite beautiful mini PCs to me. Never even considered another brand. They all always just worked with any Linux I put on them.
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.
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 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...
Gutted. I run an i3 bought in 2014 as a mini Tailscale router and Plex music server, along as other servies like PiHole. That thing has never been shut off and is still performing well at its third or fourth os upgrade!
That's a shame. I remember reading about the P14e laptop chassis. For me, it looked like the perfect laptop: 3:2 screen, ethernet port, trackpoint, decent battery. I didn't really care about the modularity. I could only find them for sale in bulk, or from a German company that re-branded them. I came this close to just buying a lot of 5 and trying to sell 4 on ebay, but I had a suspicion I would never be able to find parts for it if it broke, so I ended up buying a used T480 instead. It's over twice as heavy, but I think I made the right choice.
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.
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.
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)
This is sad news. I have two NUC's. The old one I got 6 or 7 years ago and still runs great, as a headless Linux server. The newer one serves as a daily Windows driver.
That’s a shame. After building a few of my own computers/servers with used parts over the years, I switched to buying used NUCs for my last two projects (computer in my shed/workshop for basic CAD, and a quicksync plex transcoding box). I’ve found them more meaningfully powerful than a raspberry pi but much smaller than a large computer. I was hoping with ARM advancements that we’d see some super low power NUCs in the future.
Same here, I'm really going to miss that. I've been using the discontinued lower-end NUCs from eBay as home servers and they're amazing for that purpose.
Does anyone know of a similar deal to be had from another brand? (Apart from optiplex - I see the recommendations already and they do look nice)
The only place I ever encountered these was in the computer labs in Soda Hall at Berkeley. They’re a great fit for an environment like that so there’s one machine for each person without needing the extra space for a traditional tower. But I imagine outside of situations like this where you need something that’s not locked down for programming, Chromebooks have probably taken the lion’s share of the education market.
I thought these might eventually have their day with a GaN PSU and a touch screen, running Windows 10+. Kind of like the Continuum vision Microsoft had for Windows Phone; carry a little brick around and dock it as needed. But we have cell phones, tablets, and SoC, so NUC doesn't really excel at anything
Man it's a bad season for small form factor computers. I have four small home computers that are all NUC or PC-engine depending on needs, and now both are discontinued. The NUCs were difficult to justify on price alone, but whenever I looked all the reputable competitors were larger and/or louder.
Those things were cool. I wanted to buy one for years, just couldn’t find one in person. I was going to screw it to the back of my monitor to get a Linux all in one like setup going
Man. Maybe I should grab one before it’s too late. Why do companies keep killing their coolest products?
There are tons of USFF / Micro form factor PCs from Dell, HP, and Lenovo on ebay, they're often a lot cheaper than the NUC too because they're usually old business hardware being sold off in bulk.
The NUC is neat but it's certainly not the only PC in that style out there.
I guess Intel is not the kind of company that would reinvent itself with a "iphone moment".
Granted the idea of a personal home cloud is not exactly radical and Intel does not have an OS (though they could adopt linux) but its not a stretch of imagination to think every home running one or more such devices.
The challenge of navigating the post-Moore's law era clearly requires focus as a few more missteps (whatever happened to Xeon Phi?) could be terminal.
The best way to survive an uncertain future is to shrewdly engineer one to your liking, rather than chase others working on their own strengths.
This makes me sad, but fortunately there are many other manufacturers in this space. I have an NUC10i7FNB Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10710U CPU @ 1.10GHz, 1608 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s) NUC as my desktop computer.
I love it! I work with IntelliJ for Java multithreaded software development usually with 12 software threads due to the 12 hardware threads, I work with up to 3 Lubuntu LXQT virtual machines simultaneously but usually just 1.
It's 4" by 4" compact and I use a Anker bluetooth speaker with it and it has 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD.
I was admiring my old Intel atom passive cooled boards and an now non-working Motorola Smartphone with also an Intel atom. I still think fondly about those x86 initiatives.
Seems like a huge lost opportunity for by Intel not targeting the "consumer" cloud compute market with NUC's, because they wanted to protect their high margin server chip business.
There's huge classes of workloads that a NUC would do just fine on for the cloud, and cloud operators would love the lower power & physical size of these NUC compute devices.
AMD has embraced it, and you'll see 7000 chips at various cloud compute companies like OVH & Hetzner.
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've always been a fan and have owned a few, but this market is being absolutely flooded with options right now, so I'm not surprised. ETA PRIME is a good YouTube account to follow if you're interested in such things as he seems to review a different mini PC each week (in between all the handheld PCs and SBCs).
I will caution against ETA PRIME. Dude never has a single negative word to say about anything, his channel amounts to a marketing department for Beelink/Minisforum/etc.
His GTR6 review (I own one of these machines) didn't talk much or at all about the notorious noise or stuttering problems that plague this machine, for example. I have little reason to trust many of his other reviews in light of that - he puts reviews out quickly before the device hits the market, which is certainly a niche (no real competition to his reviews), but then the devices come out and it's a grab bag as to whether his experiences will match your own (the /r/minipcs subreddit had various accounts of this before I quit reddit)
Fair enough! I use his channel as a way to keep up to date with what exists and is happening in the space rather than for objective reviews (since little he reviews is available in my country anyway) but others might want to take heed of your note.
The NUC was a great idea delivered by a company that was totally opposed to it by design. You had big fat inefficient Intel cores crammed into low TDP applications and to make matters worse they wanted massive margins. Could’ve been a fantastic product delivered by ARM or some smartphone manufacturer.
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.
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.
NUCs seemed like they pushed too far along the price/size curve. People are generally okay with a midsize tower (or even a laptop with an external monitor). Maybe if they used actual laptop mainboards they could have reduced cost.
Sad in a way. the classic NUC form factor is all I expect we will see going forward. I don't expect we will see anything interesting or different like the beast canyon, ghost canyon or raptor canyon form factors again
It's interesting to see posts about reason why people chose NUC rather than other options. There are now many followers in this space so it's natural decision, but I wish they fill some niches.
I am sad but there are still a lot of better ones like beelink systems that appeal to me more than a nuc. Still I got a 6th gen back home and it sits unused since I don't have a good use for it.
I was looking for an Intel NUC 13 i5 since I have a very limited workspace at home and to my understanding Intel has a very decent quality offering and Linux support.
For now, you can still buy a $500 NUC13ANKi5 (slim, only M.2 SSDs) or NUC13ANHi5 (tall, also a 2.5" SSD/HDD) without worries.
What Intel said is that they will not launch any new models, so the future NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU must have been canceled, or perhaps sold to a partner like ASRock.
The best alternatives are from ASUS, Beelink and Minisforum.
Alternatives with lower performance, but perhaps also lower prices, are from Gigabyte, Zotac, ASRock and ASRock Industrial, and from a lot of smaller Chinese companies, which are the cheapest, but which also have more variable quality.
If your target had been an i7 Raptor Lake, then at the same price you could have bought a SFF with a much faster AMD Phoenix CPU (Ryzen 7 7840U, Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS).
Because you want a medium performance medium price computer, you can find at a lower price than a Raptor Lake i5, i.e. under $500, SFF computers with the Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU (Zen 3+), which are faster and which also have a much faster GPU.
Well to be honest my major concern on the ASUS, Beelink, Minisforum alternatives esp with the 7735HS is Linux compatibility and thermal management. If my setup can play well with Debian or Arch I'm sold.
The thermal management seems to have been significantly improved in many models of this year in comparison with the models from previous years, but you cannot make guesses about it without seeing a credible review.
I have not heard of any problems in Linux with the recent AMD models. While AMD still does not provide a comparable software support to Intel, at least recently the delays in providing kernel and drivers updates for their new products seem to have been reduced.
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.
This makes me reflect on prior milestones in PC packaging from my own POV. There is an almost tidal dance between the various thermal and performance measures and how these different devices meet use cases. But I think there is also the overall flattening trend where machines have exceeded "good enough" for many people and so the differences are more subtle, highlighting thinks like expansion/upgrade/maintenance versus aesthetics or other intangibles.
A long-term shift for me is that my storage needs stopped growing with the market. Decades ago, I needed to run multiple HDDs whether for mass storage or RAID protection, but now find myself satisfied with mostly single-SSD systems. For personal use, I can mirror and backup between systems rather than needing so much redundancy inside of one. And, any machine I would consider today has sufficient desktop graphics to drive one or two 4K displays to my satisfaction for reading, writing, web browsing, and general software development. The most relevant specs for me now are CPU+GPU+RAM vs power consumption, noise, and heat.
You might think the NUC was aimed right at me. But, I ignored NUCs as I saw them as just another bookshelf system which I'd already dismissed before Intel entered the game. For an integrated black box, laptops seem close enough to the same specs, while arguably having more versatility and better pricing due to their market size and economy of scale. But let me go back through my long-term observations here...
A little over 20 years ago, the Pentium-M made a showing that seemed to bring laptop performance up to meet desktops, largely because it was so much more power efficient and didn't suffer as much thermal throttling while competing against the hot-running Pentium 4. For a brief period, I thought all I needed was a Thinkpad. I also fantasized about a desktop based on one (or more!) of these chips. Years before that, the Pentium MMX made a similar showing in laptops, but then desktops got into SMP and bigger RAM and the MHz wars.
Around the same time as the Pentium-M, mini PCs like the Shuttle XPC gained popularity as a format between normal desktops and laptops. They usually used desktop chips and heat-pipe cooling solutions, with some limited expansion bays for disks and PCI cards. But the Athlon64 soon arrived and upset the status quo. I was enamored with an XPC running an Athlon64. I later soured on this XPC form factor when I realized it was almost as disposable as a laptop. Few parts would complement the exact model I owned, and most useful upgrades meant a whole system replacement. I learned that motherboards, power supplies, and cooling solutions also need maintenance or upgrade options.
I reverted to uATX boards and chassis for home systems. I could manage these as Ships of Theseus with more modular upgrades over a decade or more, including a system that migrated from Athlon64 to Athlon64 x2 to Phenom. Also following on the Pentium-M was Intel's response to the Athlon64---the Core and Core2 eras. I left AMD behind and enjoyed long-lived Core 2 systems starting starting with the venerable Q6600 and visting Haswell to end with Skylake. I still have the Skylake system in cold storage, because I've found myself back just running laptops.
On my employer's budget, I always went with beefy Intel-based workstations in the office and Thinkpads for travel and after hours or occasional WfH duty. My home systems were mostly for entertainment. The Covid lockdown sent me back into using a work laptop full-time, as we scurried to full WfH. My first Ryzen-based Thinkpad was eye opening as a capable desktop when docked. I eventually retired the workstation in my (now vacant) office, as I wasn't even bothering to access it anymore. Other work things continue on remote access colo servers and cloud hosting...
> "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger took over, they've cut RealSense, Movidius, Optane Memory, IPO'd MobileEye, and now exited the Server Systems business. The only odd-ball left are their NUC business."
If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers...
It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I'm currently typing this on a Serpent Canyon NUC though, so it's certainly bittersweet.