Damn, this is a sad day for the homelab.
The article says Intel is working with partners to “continue NUC innovation and growth”, so we will see what that manifests as.
They were too pricy for me. I ended up with Bee-link machines (SER4/5/5Pro) and am happy with them.
Yeah I always coveted one but couldn’t justify the cost over second hand dell or lenovo SFF PCs.
Oh man i was thinking of getting one of these to replace my raspberry pi
Lenovo or HP mini PC would be a much better bang for your buck.
They’re also a lot bigger and don’t really fall under the same miniPC classification.
They’re not a lot bigger than a NUC. My HP mini PC’s footprint is like 8"x8"
And NUCs are usually 4x4. That’s literally half the footprint.
Edit: a quarter of the size. This is why I don’t do math before coffee.
Unless space is the absolute unchangeable primary concern than the size difference doesn’t matter.
Okay, sure, but we’re talking about inches. 8x8 isn’t a large footprint. Don’t be obtuse. Also 4x4 is 1/4 the footprint of 8x8.
Don’t you mean a quarter of the footprint? It’s half the size per side.
Maybe ironically with the prices dropping on these people will actually buy them…
Every time I’ve had a use for these either a business PC (or ex-business referb for home) has always been a better, cheaper answer.
where do you find refurbs? I’d love to get my hands on an ex-business refurb!
+1 I’m curious too
My city has a couple mom-and-pop type businesses doing it, I’d hazard a guess it’s similar elsewhere - never heard of any ‘big name’ outfits doing it on any real scale.
What’s your mom-and-pop businesses called? They have similar names or similar ways of finding them… Would make it easier to find those around me.
I haven’t used them in a while, but I used to go to Calgary Computer Wholesale
“Computer wholesale”. Got it. 😊
Thanks! Gotta keep a lookout for them deals!
You could use eBay but that’s usually the option of last resort.
Your local city probably has referb shops that sell them or if you’re keen you can pick them up directly from auction for peanuts.
If you’re in a major city theres likely a recycling centre just for old office machines. You can snag them dirt cheap, but with no Harddrive. Theyre a bit dated, but will work great as a server.
In a similar vein is to look for government auctions in town. I’ve got a major public university in my city, and it maintains a permanent auction warehouse. Like once a month they sell all kinds of stuff, from mini fridges to laptops by the pallet.
Ah this sucks. They’re such a great size and very capable. I’m currently using one as my all in one home server - it’s been flawless.
Minisforum is taking the torch from them. I just bought one from them which is essentially a NUC, it has a Core i7 and RTX 3070 mobile in it. It’s pretty much a laptop without a screen. They make tons of smaller ones if you forgo the integrated high-end GPU.
Lame. I was just thinking about possibly picking up a NUC to run a Jellyfin home media server and such. Seemed like a perfect use case. Oh well, guess we’ll see where intel goes with it…
Plenty of alternatives to a NUC still out there. I like the MSI Cubi personally.
Sad to see these go. I use one for my Nextcloud home server and am happy with it.
rip :(
This is unfortunate, these NUC are inexpensive and reliable for the conference room.
AMD seems to be eating their lunch in small computers for consumers with their APUs in the Steamdeck and the more than a half dozen like handhelds, mini-pcs, etc. I’m sure intel will hang onto small embedded devices for industrial applications for some time but it’s puzzling that they would just drop RISCV which seems poised to proliferate in this sector as well. It could just be that intel seeing that manufacture in China is and will continue to be very tricky has to narrow focus while they move their manufacture closer to home.
Rest in peace, NUCs, you were great.
Funny timing on this since the mini pc market is picking up steam from what I can tell. Then again, these are overpriced compared to the competition.
That depends. I don’t think Intel actually wants to be in the market for whole (or barebones) systems. they probably would much rather just sell the processors and leave the rest to others. The NUCs were just a tool to kickstart the market, which seems to have worked quite nicely. The only issue being that now both AMD and Apple are strong competion.
So under that assumption this withdrawal makes a lot of sense, especially now that they need to focus all of their resources to catch up in their main business segment.
Didn’t Valve make similar comments for the steam deck? That they see it as a tool to create a new market and hope that others follow.
Even if someone else were to make a much better handheld. As long as it runs Proton/Steam Valve would still win.
I own a bunch of them, generations five through ten, and have always had a love/hate relationship with them. None has ever died on me. My main workstation at home, as well as two “homelab” servers are NUCs. They Just Work<tm> under both Ubuntu and Proxmox.
The love is for them just working. The hate is for Intel :-)
What they got wrong:
- cooling. CPU cooling is finely tuned and controllable through the BIOS, no qualms there. The disk and the NVME SSD have no cooling whatsoever. Sticking an small 40mm fan to the side and running it at the minimum RPM drops the case temperature from 60°C to 40°C and avoids the NVME SSD burning out. Needless to say, a glued on fan looks fugly.
- opening. By refusing to let their firmware be accessible to the fwupdmgr mechanism, Intel forces its Linux users to physically go to the machine, stick in a USB thumbdrive, keyboard and a monitor, and click their way through the BIOS update. In contrast, my Dell gear gets updated online through fwupdmgr, and I just have to suffer a reboot with a few minutes of downtime. I don’t even have to be at the keyboard.
- remote monitoring. I bought two NUC’s with vPRO support, to allow for remote management. But the remote console sucks eggs even from a Windows management station, so I wound up disabling it on all of them. Both Dell’s iDRAC and HP’s ILO run circles around vPRO based remote management.
That’s not a lot to go wrong for such a big endeavour, which is why I will keep hating Intel and sorely missing the upgrade opportunity. Just hoping Dell will step into the void.
I got one for my mother when she needed a new PC and it died within a month. Not intel’s fault though, chip on the SSD died, first time I’ve seen an m.2 SSD die like that. Replacement going strong.
What do you recommend for desktops that aren’t the big ass tower?
Really depends on what you are using it for
- Internet browsing and media consumption on a big monitor? Light code development and/or office work? Just get a semi-modern laptop with USB c (preferably thunderbolt) out and a hub.
- Gaming: Honestly? The Steam Deck or one of the other vita form factor PCs are surprisingly good bang for your buck gaming wise. Same rules regarding a hub and monitors. And some gaming laptops are pretty affordable too.
- “Power user”: Build an htpc/mini-itx build and learn to hate everything about cable management
I love my big ass full sized tower. But the vast majority of computer users would be fine with a laptop and a dock/hub.
I think user asked for a small factor PC, just like intel nuc. IMO intel nuc is a perfect PC for a work desktop. They can even mount on the back of the monitor - excellent feature. Not sure if any other brand has such feature.
People ask for a lot of things. But it boils down to what they are actually trying to do.
The nuc was… a bad product. Power wise, the moment you do anything you start running into thermal issues. Getting a used one cheap is great for home automation and lightweight server work (hell, my router/firewall is more nuc than not). But in terms of actual user computing? A laptop is better in almost every possible way. If only because you aren’t mounting it to the back of a monitor: it IS the monitor. Similar (often much better) performance, similar thermal savings in a crowded office, and you can take your laptop into meetings or even home because 9 to 5 is just a suggestion when you are salaried.
In a lot of ways, nucs felt like a pretty big misstep even at the time. We already had thin(nish) clients in the form of the Solaris Sun ray and the like. Which, to a corporate environment, provides pretty much all the benefits AND a much more centralized security model (we see a shift back to that with the push for VDI solutions).
And from the conversation with that user: They want a computer for gaming. A nuc was never going to be that. A low-ish tier gaming laptop (I have a Razer Blade Stealth that I love) might do that. But they have their heart set on a “real computer”. MAYBE a nuc-like with a good APU could do that but… thermals. Which means, a desktop of some form. Whether it is an HTPC or a tower or whatever.
I get your point and I agree with you, but let me clarify what I was talking about.
The idea is a very small office where people don’t focus on working with computer, but rather use computer to help certain tasks, process payments, save something to MS Excel and so on. Those people don’t really need laptops, so stationary devices are perfect.
Just focus on what I wrote. I am the “admin” of such “small office”.
Intel nuc is perfect solution for me, the performance is more than enough and small size factor really takes the cake. I am really sad that NUC goes away and hope that soon there would be alternative. ✌️
And in that case, a thin client is probably what you want. And in a lot of ways, NUCs set that back pretty far.
Well I’d like better cooling than a laptop, which should make it last longer. But a full size tower just doesn’t seem necessary anymore.
Again, it really depends on what you are using it for.
“Gaming laptops” are often fairly horrible for temperature control. But otherwise? Most modern laptops have performance comparable to the average desktop that has poorly applied thermal paste and was never maintenanced in its existence.
Say for modest/patient gaming.
Then yeah. Steam Deck. GDP Win whatever the hell, Aya Neo, or (if you don’t expect to ever need any customer support) the asus one.
Bang for your buck? Those rival (arguably beat if you aren’t a youtuber with a warehouse full of free parts) desktop builds, tend to have okay-ish thermals, and don’t have many battery issues when docked. And most of them double as mediocre “normal” computing experiences on top.
Well personally for me not a handheld because I still want a computer for office and things like that (and not cheap one because the more RAM the better). I’ve seen people fiddle with their steam deck but I don’t want to bother with that.
Look at minisforum and beelink.
I can second Beelink here. I bought a Beelink SER5 for US$380 as a gaming computer for my kids. It’s an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with a Vega GPU, 16G RAM and a 500GB SSD. It probably won’t work well with the latest graphics-intensive games, but it’s been great so far with a bunch of games my kids like.
That one worked so well that when I needed a new desktop computer for their schoolwork and similar, I got another Beelink, this time a Mini S12 for US$200. It’s an Intel N95 with 8G RAM and a 256G SSD. Works absolutely fantastically for its purpose.
Both are tiny and silent.
The M1/M2 Mac Mini is really nice.
A bit too expensive for a book weight.
I’m fine with it. Their competitors passed them by a few years ago anyway. The only thing the Intel branded stuff was better at now- was being more expensive.
Agree, love my NUC but it seems the last few years they haven’t been the best option. It seems like they lost touch with what people wanted from them around the time they started releasing models that supported a full size GPU.
started releasing models that supported a full size GPU.
Exactly what nobody on earth wants from a mini pc.
