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Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

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Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#51

Post by squokko »

DesiLurker wrote: post #44

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

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#52

Post by hiatus »

DesiLurker wrote: post #44

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.

> Apple does totally fine with mac mini

How do you know this? I personally decided against a mini when I specced one out and a MBP wound up cheaper. The pricing strategy certainly made me _feel_ like they were pushing me away from the mini.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#53

Post by bamfly »

electrosphere wrote: post #36
blahyawnblah wrote: post #18

I've had one for about 7 years now that's been my htpc. Nice, little, quiet, and it worked great. Was thinking about upgrading soon. Guess I'll have to figure something else out.

I wanted one for this purpose to replace a Dell Optiplex SFF running Kodi. It's dual-core CPU and cannot decode x265 efficiently. The NUCs are a bit too expensive though and plenty of x264 content still available.

YMMV but I've found my watching:fiddling-with-the-system ratio to be way higher with Jellyfin than it ever was in my years and years of trying and failing to enjoy Kodi/XBMC. And it's way more usable for other members of my family, who tended to look at Kodi and (understandably) just go "nope, not touching that". If they actually tried they'd usually need me to rescue them from some weird, useless mode they'd gotten stuck in, before they managed to watch anything. Zero such trouble with Jellyfin. And the (web) admin interface is so much nicer & faster to use, on the rare occasions that I do need to go change something. Again, I get that some people find Kodi OK, but it might be worth taking a look if you're not totally, entirely happy with it.

Similar issue with x265 content though. I've solved that by just using Apple TVs for our two TVs—also fixes any worries about surround not outputting correctly or whatever, that you can run into with hacked-together solutions. Spendy, but they've wasted none of my time and have never not-worked. Any other devices we connect to it with (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones) all support x265, so that's a non-issue. Maybe newer Rokus support x265, IDK, but none of mine do, which is the only reason I'm not still using those as my set-top client devices.

(if you stick with Kodi, though: RPi4 supports hardware x265, I think)

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#54

Post by stevezsa8 »

DesiLurker wrote: post #44

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.

How is the beelink? I'm really tempted by the price and what you get. But I've never bought anything that wasn't a well known brand like Dell.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#55

Post by hiatus »

stemlord wrote: post #42
bamfly wrote: post #34

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.

Strange this was downvoted. I put together a VR-capable nuc for under $1k, definitely not even in the same ballpark as a pi.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#56

Post by xnx »

I want to like these, but they hit the opposite of a sweet spot (sour spot? sore spot?): More expensive than a laptop (which also have a screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, etc.) and much larger than a dongle.

The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#57

Post by antisthenes »

xnx wrote: post #56

I want to like these, but they hit the opposite of a sweet spot (sour spot? sore spot?): More expensive than a laptop (which also have a screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, etc.) and much larger than a dongle. The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.

The dongle is not a sweet spot for anything but low power embedded IOT stuff.

Modern desktop computing takes at least 25-35W of consistent power, and there's absolutely NO way to fit that power envelope in a dongle factor, unless you surround it with a block of solid copper.

> The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.

meh.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#58

Post by ndriscoll »

gorkish wrote: post #24

Of all the NUCs they ever made; there is one singular model with 10G ethernet. And yeah good luck getting it. The lack of any significant IO to the outside world crippled these things massively. I tried to order 3 NUCs once; after waiting 6 months for stock, I gave up. Seems nothing will actually be lost. Anybody make ANYTHING that is nuc-like and has 10G+? HP Elitedesk 800 mini has a flexio option for a single 10g p…

Looks like there's some stuff on aliexpress like [0]. 2x10G SFP + 4x2.5G + 6 SATA ports for $343 bare seems like a pretty great NAS box on paper, assuming the processor and internal IO can actually handle everything. There's also [1] with 2x10G SFP and 3x2.5G for $276. Personally I'm hoping for something with 10G SFP + 6xSATA + an N305 processor, which I think doesn't exist yet. On paper, the N305 is almost 2x as good as the i5-6600 I have in my desktop, and these things use almost no power, so that'd make for a killer home server/NAS.

[0] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805527368249.html

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803996127706.html

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#59

Post by rsynnott »

DesiLurker wrote: post #44

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.

> Apple does totally fine with mac mini.

Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#60

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

hiatus wrote: post #52
DesiLurker wrote: post #44

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.

> Apple does totally fine with mac mini How do you know this? I personally decided against a mini when I specced one out and a MBP wound up cheaper. The pricing strategy certainly made me _feel_ like they were pushing me away from the mini.

Huh? A QHD display for 200, a hand-me-down keyboard and mouse, and I have a better machine with a mini.

Besides, I'd use an external display anyways, not working at caffées.

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