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.
Oh man i was thinking of getting one of these to replace my raspberry pi
Maybe ironically with the prices dropping on these people will actually buy them…
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.
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.
Unless space is the absolute unchangeable primary concern than the size difference doesn’t matter.
Don’t you mean a quarter of the footprint? It’s half the size per side.
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.
I was just looking at buying one second hand yesterday… Better buy one before everyone ramps up their prices!
Great machines, I use an NUC8i7 as our HTPC. Supports 4K 60fps. Got it hooked up to a Denon amp for Dolby Atmos. At some point i hope I’ll find time to look into Home Assistant, I’d use another NUC for running that.
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.
I think this has more to do with the refurbished small form factor business PCs eating up their market share as they flooded the market. I can get a decent i5 unit for $100and throw a $100 into it in upgrades and hit the same performance as their $300-400+ price range.
I found an HP SFF for like $60 at the thrift store with a 4th gen i5 and it was kitted out with more ram and a 250gb SDD. Perfect HTPC for what I do. I was shopping NUCs too.
Good find! I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and all the thrift stores near me are overpriced, so I never find good deals like that.
I got this at my local overpriced thrift store and was surprised they didn’t want a shit ton for it. This place will put ebay listing (not even sold) prices on their electronics. I think it came out of their office or something.
This is unfortunate, these NUC are inexpensive and reliable for the conference room.
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.
What’s the opinion about System76’s mini PCs? I’ve just ran across them and thinking of getting one.
I don’t own one, but want to as well. Commenting here to return and see what anyone replies to you.
Commenting here to return and see what anyone replies to you.
Not sure about Kbin, but Lemmy has a bookmarks feature for this.
I bought one several years ago (at least 6 years) and I.find it still works great. Though i’m not very demanding in how I use it
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’ve bought a few dozen of these things, shame to see them go.
I have been using a Beelink mini PC in my home entertainment setup for about a year. It has been very reliable and solid. No issues with 4k content.
I kind of get it. MinisForum and companies like it have sort of carried the torch of what the NUC started. I loved the NUCs, but this was kind of inevitable.
I have two MinisForum miniPCs and I absolutely love them, I’ve had them on for months at the time without any issues. Before I got them I was looking into the Intel NUCs and they were way too expensive for the specs. Sure, their top of the line NUCs are absolute beasts in a tiny form factor, but their basic entry level stuff is for burning money
100% but its a lot easier for a business to go “we need to purchase X number this intel product” vs “We need to spend X on product from some company your non-technical ass has never heard of”
In the consumer/small business space I think we will be fine for options but the intel NUC was great for a lot of business applications and I will miss it!
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.
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.
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.
Sad to see these go. I use one for my Nextcloud home server and am happy with it.
