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.
