Intel is quitting on its adorable, powerful, and upgradable mini NUC computers

Jesus Christ. Why does it feel like tech industry is just getting shittier and more expensive, while all the cool consumer options are being axed. Intel Nucs were a relatively cheap way to get a cute little desktop machine or a home server. I am sad that they're going away. I guess there's always Minisforum, but still...

Because infinite growth of profits on a finite planet.
- Yeah this part bothers me. To these companies a solid profit stream is not viable. It has to be iPhone level growth year after year or they think it’s failing and axe it. It’s quite annoying. Eventually you will hit a plateau. That just means it’s a mature market, not failing. Grrrr…
- Capitalism is unsustainable. We're seeing what happens in late capitalism. The belts tighten, the workers get left in the dust, the products consumers actually want get the axe.
- While companies today are certainly overzealous in their drive for growth, it is a myth that infinite economic growth is impossible. It is not only possible but necessary: https://medium.com/@oliverwaters76079/the-strange-necessity-of-infinite-economic-growth-ebc2e505cdf1
Relatively cheap? Huh? At $500-$1000 they were exactly the opposite of a relatively cheap desktop machine.
- There was a great resale market for them. I got an i7 8th gen for about $200-300 new when the 10th gen came out. It was clearly never used overstock that a reseller picked up cheap. Its a champ of a machine, still going strong.
  They also made cheap celeron models that sold in the $100-200 range that were 5x as powerful as the raspi that would normally fill the niche.
- IKR? For what they wanted I could get a faster full size machine with better expandability. I get the value in a small box, but unless you had some commercial application or wanted some special architectural aesthetic in your home that required that size, it was a waste of money.
Intel NUCs were very good machines but honestly they were completely overpriced compared to Chuwi/Minisforum/etc.
My guess is they were just not enough sales, that's all.
- What’s the Chuwi Equivalent to a Nuc? Not being snarky, im genuinely looking for a small server.
- According to The Register's piece, Intel sales were around 10 million NUCs in 10 years. I guess they don't count other companies' sales for that, despite using intel CPUs?
- Oh lort. You just gave me flashbacks. One of my kids bought one of those $200 Chuwi laptops and it would barf all over itself about once a month, so badly it would require a reinstall.
Chip shortage. Since COVID, chip companies have been having a really hard time getting properly restocked. This impacts all electronics industries. Cars, computers, even Apple had to redesign some of their products to accommodate the shortages, so has many other companies big and small. The Raspberry Pi prices have soared. So products that take a chip away from a more mainstream or lucrative market are being axed.
There’s a chip shortage. Most people just use web based apps, so stay on their phones / cheap laptops Enthusiasts usually just build their own machines. Everything is more expensive. The list goes on
Probably because people aren't spending their money on it.
- For most people, why get a nuc when you can get a laptop? Nuc fills a niche.

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.

Sad really, but the issue, as someone as mentioned already is they were too expensive.

Yeah. Not sure why people would be proud of paying more for less.
It's not like the size difference is prohibitive compared to a normal workstation.

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!
- @damnthefilibuster @Kushia
  You can get a hold of them via #eBay. Every now and then a business upgrades and floods the market.
  One of these days I want to buy a whole bunch of them and build a #Beowulf cluster.
- 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.
- +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.

I think there's a niche for a computer slightly more powerful than a raspberry pi, with no need for active cooling, capable of running as a basic always-on server.

The Intel NUCs were always a bit too expensive for that, and the Raspberry Pis are slightly underpowered (plus the SD-card as the primary storage is limiting). But, there are increasingly ways that people who aren't massive computer geeks would want an always-on computer. Things like a home security system, a media downloader, a home automation machine, etc. The power consumption, noise and size of a desktop computer is just overkill for that. A Raspberry Pi could be, but the default versions are not designed as servers. They're more robotics sandboxes.

Each generation brought incremental improvements and I feel like they were just starting to hit their stride and get somewhere, but your comment does allude to the issues NUCs have in their current state.
For me it's not a comparison with a Raspberry pi, NUC is far too expensive for that. It's that I'm paying top dollar for a less capable system than I can build in a small form factor from standard parts.
They made some decent leaps forward in recent years, but they've been passed as if they were standing still by the likes of the Beelink GTR6. Better price, better thermals, better for gaming, better by every metric you could throw at it.
Again I think it would be a real shame for intel to give up right now because it seems as if the gap between a low-spec traditional gaming PC and what can be achieved in one of these little boxes is all but closed with AMD hardware, and the NUC wasn't really that far off either: they just needed another couple of little boosts and a reality check on their pricing.
The GTR6 sells for $619USD and will play games at 1080p or 2560x1080 with performance far better than anything I can build myself for anywhere close to that price. In traditional computing workloads, it's even better! It will handily beat my Jan 2021 balls-to the wall $6000 PC in most CPU tasks.
Say for example I was looking to build a PC for my dad to game on at the above resolutions. By the time I've bought a decently rated PSU, Motherboard and a modest CPU: the GTR6 has already beaten me. My build can't go any further because I can't beat it without spending dumb money.
I'm not personally in the market for one of these things, but the moment they provide an easy means to mate a high-spec GPU to the crazy hardware already inside a NUC or GTR6 style box for a competitive price...it's going to be a pretty difficult decision to justify another monster desktop PC build.
The stupid thing is, Intel were already so close to being there! The NUC 11 Extreme Kit was exactly this, it was just priced in the most noncompetitive manner and for that stupid money, it only came barebones - still requiring you to buy further components as well as add a GPU. https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/intel-nuc-11-extreme-kit-beast-canyon
I've rambled enough. I really wish intel hadn't given up on this space, but I have a bit of faith that smaller operators are going to continue to leverage the power of AMD's mobile offerings and fairly soon, land on a formula that near enough eliminates the appeal of my beloved custom PC.
https://youtu.be/iaYHtfa1-pY
https://youtu.be/Ye7BmiPsqiA
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/iaYHtfa1-pY
  https://piped.video/Ye7BmiPsqiA
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- I agree, and as ARM becomes more standardized (less janky), it will be a great platform for deploying these things. I just got a few rockchip 3588 sbcs and in spite of the minimal support for them, they are very impressive. Building out a proper xarm standard will be huge for lower power devices that can take a lot of need away from local big power sinks.
  The future is still bright even with NUC going away.
- Thanks for the info. I haven't paid much attention to the NUCs lately, because the Raspberry Pis, despite their limitations, were closer to the specs I needed, and you can't beat their price to performance ratio.
  I didn't realize quite how good the NUCs and the NUC-likes had become. Way overkill for what I wanted though.
There's a few boards that bridge the gap between pi and a pc for media servers and small NAS uses. Look at Asus Tinker board, Odroid, Udoo Bolt, Orange Pi, Rockpro64, BeagleBone
- I've only recently been thinking of setting up a media server or NAS. Currently have a RaspberryPi running a 3D print server, but like you say RaspberryPi's are a bit weak hardware wise and limited by the SD card. But I never wanted to spend the money on a NUC. I'll have to check out these other options you mentioned, thanks for listing them.
I just bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q Mini Tiny Desktop PC Computer i5 6400T 1TB SSD Win 10 Pro from Ebay for $289 AUD and plugged in some oldish external SSDs and HDDs and now have 10TB of storage. I'm really pleased with it, it took about half an hour to install Proxmox and I've now got 5 VMs up and running.
the Raspberry Pis are slightly underpowered (plus the SD-card as the primary storage is limiting).
OrangePi has been my go-to since these got expensive. More features, including a 8gb emmc module built in, and just as cheap.
- I'll have to look into that, it may be more what I need.
There's a niche type of CPU cooler you can get that uses just thermal mass, e.g. thermal pipes from your CPU spreader to finned metal on your case or directly into your case. They can't provide as much cooling as liquid but it has zero moving parts.
I tried to get one of these cases/coolers for my home server and just could NOT find reasonably priced options or much availability. It's kind of absurd, there should be a larger market for them.
I didn't want to have to worry about dust build up and fans dying myself.
They are out there but not in large quantities.
i.e. my new home server runs on an odroid H3

Real shame. Best purchase I've made for running Proxmox with Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Home Assistant

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.

Between Minisforum and Beelink putting out NUC-likes with AMD, Intel just can't compete. I'm biased in favor of team red to begin with, but you just cannot tell me an Intel NUC provides better per dollar value than the above's offerings. I've used NUCs, I like NUCs, but why pay more for less when there exist alternatives?

Exactly, for a home lab I would pick an Amd over Intel just to have the extra cores on top of costing less.
- The reason for wanting intel is the iGPU to get quicksync.
For me it's the hardware transcoding capabilities of the Nuc is what makes it stand out.
Quick sync is so good and well supported that Intel is a no brainier for me.
I mean, they're the OEM, they could easily have lowered their own prices. It's not like they were taking a loss on each unit.

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.

What do you recommend for desktops that aren't the big ass tower?
- Look at minisforum and beelink.
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.

I got an i7-6700 skull canyon? for free through work many years ago, absolutely love it, it now serves as a Linux box and hosts server stuff on it. Only issue is a ram port died and seemed a common problem!?

Still enjoying using it and it's form factor is fantastic, not sure if I would replace my own desktop with it but would have been an easy consideration for the kids first PC although it may benefit them actually building a tower and learning.

Shame to hear they are stopping

Go used. Lots of people get rid of their hardware when just a bit of care and repairs will make it as useful as brand new.
Out of curiosity what kind if work do you do?

The article makes it sound they cost over $1,000 (USD?) and were impossible to find but here in Australia I never had any issues finding and unless you were going for the extreme versions, there closer to $5-600AUD which made them a great fit. All we can hope is that there’s a few other brands who are willing to fill the space with equal quality products.

- equal quality products
  Except they don't fill this niche. Sure, Beelinks and minisforum are neat and cheap, but they tend to have QC problems and don't stack up well against Intel NUCs.
- I replaced my old, fairly high end pc with a fairly high end Beelink a few months ago, and it's working out fine. The beelink mini is cheaper, better and faster in every way, and will end up as about 5% of the trash my old PC exists as. I'm not sure I'm going back to full-sized desktop pcs, despite being a game artist/game developer who needs somewhat high specs to do my work.
there closer to $5-600AUD
New or used?
- That was for new entry level specs, you could obviously spend a lot more on the highest specs but often the NUC fit a segment that didn’t need to be bleeding edge of performance.

That’s a bummer. Maybe framework will fill the void lol

There are plenty of alternatives to the NUC. MinisForum, StarLabs and System76 out of the top of my head

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.

Damn. I may need to buy a couple

That sucks, I hope this isn't a statement about the "Mini-Pc" market in general. I've been thinking about getting one as a "Steam machine/ emulation station" for a long time but the stars never really lined up.
I've got a full sized PC in the front room getting long in the tooth and looking ridiculous that could easily be replaced. But while the 970 still plays Dave the Diver, well there's other shit money can be spent on.
Wasn't meant as a reply, pressed the wrong thing, my bad
- I still appreciate the love ✌️💛
- Right there with you. Full size ATX machine circa 2010ish, can still play GTA V fine enough. The only reason it isn’t my media server is because my Mac mini does that for less power.
  The big guy keeps chugging along when I need him, so the funds go elsewhere.

Damn, we are using them at my work and they have been very good as remotely updateable media kiosks. I just started to learn how to use them. Ofcourse well keep using them for some time still, but at some point we'll need to find another solution.

I was also thinking getting one to work as a streaming computer. Currently I use one computer setup, which causes performance issues with some games. Would a nuc work as a computer to encode the video live or would it make more sense to use a machine with s proper GPU? Any thoughts?

Encoding uses the iGPU. The iGPU should usually support 4k 60fps if it's a recent CPU.
- So Intel Nuc's are not probably ideal for that job? 1080p is good enough for me for now :)
Here's something better
- Yeah, I'm not watching Tek Syndicate content.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Qz5ggFGDO7U
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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!

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.

I hope Valve release a home console with SteamOS like this.

They did, and it was a market failure, so they dumped all their inventory for cheap.
- They weren't distributed directly by Valve though, there wasn't a standard hardware configuration, and SteamOS 3 and Proton didn't exist then.
  I think with the strength of the Steam Deck now it'd really help to solidify the Valve ecosystem. Why buy a PlayStation and re-buy your games when you can just use Steam?
  EDIT: That reminds me I really want a Steam Controller 2.0 too!
- The frustrating thing about the steam link is how locked down it is. I'm not mad that they discontinued it or that they made the software available for raspberry pi. That last part is actually really cool.
  The thing is, you can't do shit with it other than steam link. I want to hack this thing man! I want to install other shit on it and add it to the lab lol.
Before I got my Nuc, my home server was an Alienware Steam Machine lol

What's the opinion about System76's mini PCs? I've just ran across them and thinking of getting one.

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
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 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.

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.

Sad to see these go. I use one for my Nextcloud home server and am happy with it.

Sad, I have one right now and it's great. Sleek small form factor with the power of a regular PC for not really that much more money is a great idea. I haven't been the kind of guy to want to build a big rainbow LED PC in a long time, I've been appreciating I can get a great machine the size of a large hard drive

I've bought a few dozen of these things, shame to see them go.

My wife just asked me about a backup solution for pictures. Is a small pc like this onnected to network with some drives in raid the best option? Should I use to also replace our Amazon fire stick?

I bought a synology for this. I still need to add a backup plan to it though.
That's sort of how I do mine. I put all my data onto dropbox/onedrive. I've got a $100 HP USFF hooked up in my office that is a 100% online mirror for those cloud accounts, and it backs up to an 8TB external each week. I rotate that drive with a spare each month (give or take), putting the "offline" one in a firesafe. It means I have a live copy (my pc), a cloud copy (OD/DB), a second hot copy (USFF PC), a near-line backup no more than 7 days old that isn't "live" and a cold storage copy that is no more than a month old (aka less than Apple's deleted-pictures and Dropbox's previous version storage time). It cost me two external drives and the mini-pc. And if all those fail I'll probably be roaming the radioactive wasteland looking for food and losing that data won't matter.
Oh, and that little box also runs a small FTP server and my Torrents for my Linux distro collection.
I use OpenMediaVault for my NAS
But if you don't want to be the IT of your family, I'd just go with an easy solution like WDs my cloud or one drive
- I wouldn't recommend a WD My Cloud Home - it's not a NAS as such, it's a bit limited; I'd go for a Synology. or One Drive as you suggest - a 1TB plan is quite reasonable with regards to cost.

Looks like they're trying to get 3rd parties to make them. Oh well, pour one out for the quirky little machine.

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.

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.

rip :(

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 was just looking at buying one second hand yesterday... Better buy one before everyone ramps up their prices!

The M1/M2 Mac Mini is really nice.

A bit too expensive for a book weight.

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.

It’s so easy to hate that company

I mean, they're just doing whatever they believe will make them the most amount of money for the least amount of effort.
All publicly-traded corporations do the same. Intel has just been very good at it because they used to have a product that was better than the competition.

Intel would better focus on the things they master instead of building shitty gpus