181–190 of 526 posts
Any comparable brand with good Linux support?
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.
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
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I only need iGPUs for a zippy UI, because I don't game on my work devices, and don't want to have any added noise because of a dGPU.
This might be the right move for Intel, but not for users. NUCs are awesome, cost-effective devices.
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 r…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm not sure what your point is, but my Mac Mini M1 runs Linux. Asahi Linux.