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.
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.
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?
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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.
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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. ✌️
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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.
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Say for modest/patient gaming.
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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.
This is unfortunate, these NUC are inexpensive and reliable for the conference room.
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
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…
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.
Or why get a nuc when you can get a decommissioned Enterprise sff PC like a thinkcentre tiny for a quarter of the price
These are amazing. Dell, Lenovo and I think HP made these tiny things and they were so much easier to get than Pi’s during the shortage. Plus they’re incredibly fast in comparison.
Better cooing which means it would last longer.
No display, battery, camera, etc should be cheaper.
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
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.
Yeah, mini-computers are one thing, but the NUCs were more than that. Having a PCI-E card that you can slot into your computer to literally run a PC inside your PC is super unique and not something anyone else offers.
Sad to see them drop this. I can understand that it’s not an in-demand market segment, but it was cool none-the-less
Having a PCI-E card that you can slot into your computer to literally run a PC inside your PC is super unique and not something anyone else offers
My hope has been from the start that that product line would lead to some compute module-style clustering motherboards for really clean & compact x86 clusters. It would especially make sense for dedicated server/VPS providers which already rely on similar dense blade systems from Supermicro.
Imagine a box that would take 3 of them, give each a PCIe slot and an NVMe slot, and an then give you 3 power buttons, 3 sets of IO and maybe an integrated network switch so you only need 1 Ethernet cable to connect the swarm to your network. That would be useful not just for clustering in homelabs and SOHO but also for offices and such if they want to reduce the physical footprint of their PCs while maintaining pretty good serviceability for “go swap this PC out” scenerios
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.
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?
Because infinite growth of profits on a finite planet.
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/@oliverwaters_76079/the-strange-necessity-of-infinite-economic-growth-ebc2e505cdf1
Only two kinds of people believe in infinite growth; economists and psychopaths.
Infinite growth is cancer’s credo.
Maybe capitalists instead of economists? 😂
Capitalists are behind the most prelavent economic school (neoliberalism) today—just look at the history of the “Chicago school”. I doubt the capitalists themselves believe that BS, but it’s profitable for them to make the rest of the world to believe it.
I highly recommend evonomics.com, some rally good essays on there about the cult-like economic beliefs of today. Written by economists who’ve seen through the BS.
Thanks for the rec, I’ll check it out
Only two kinds of people believe in infinite growth; economists and psychopaths.
But you repeat yourself :)
So we’re going with an ad hominem attack instead of engaging in good faith?
Pretending like capitalism is this new concept that needs to be fully explored and debated before we understand that it’s bad is a pretty bad faith framing of the issue. Infinite economic growth is literally impossible because Earth has finite resources and there is a finite number of humans. There is no necessity or imperative behind infinite economic growth other than to make the ruling class richer at everyone else’s expense.
I would say just generalizing capitalism as ‘bad’ is also not in good faith. It is not without issues, and letting it be completely unrestrained would probably be disastrous. But no other economic system has lifted more people out of abject poverty or driven technological innovation as hard. There are benefits.
There’s the old “more people were in poverty before capitalism” argument.
Did capitalism bring people out of poverty? Or did access to education, healthcare, social safety nets, and proper food bring people out of poverty? Where I live, capitalism is what’s driving people into tent cities.
How does one person controlling the capital in an area, help other people if they’re gatekeeping the economic prosperity from by forcing them to perform labour, at a disproportionately low rate of recompense, to help them (the capital owner) increase their net worth? Don’t even say trickle down economics or I’ll deck you.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. And my source explains how infinite growth is possible. Consuming the resources of a finite system is not the only factor that goes into economic growth.
It’s an old joke.
Ah, I hadn’t heard that one before. Sorry if I got too defensive.
When the money supply grows infinitely then everything priced in it has to grow infinitely
It’s called taxes, don’t worry.
In a finite system, infinite anything is an impossibility.
This sounds true on its face, but if you had read my source, you would see how that argument is refuted. The problem is that you are assuming the resources of the system must be used up for growth, but that is not true.
If the last 300 years are anything to go by, we clearly do need resources if we are to maintain growth at a rate high enough to barely keep pace with the needs of the market. Coal, steal, oil, cement, water, food, etc.
The reality is, we can’t replace the current demand on renewable energy sources alone. You seem to believe the system can pivot and adapt fast enough to fix itself. While I’m of the mindset the system will follow the path of least resistance even if that means killing itself.
We need resources, yes, of course! However, consuming those resources is not the only way to generate growth. My linked post lays it out fairly clearly, I think.
Whether or not I think we, currently, can pivot quickly enough to a model that doesn’t kill us all, I don’t know. I think it’s possible, but like you, I’m also pessimistic about it happening. In any case, that is not at all what I was suggesting. My only point was that infinite economic growth is feasible in general.
Do you have the text of that article you linked? I’ll confess I hit a login wall nearly immediately into the discussion and I never log in to any of that stuff. But I am curious to read more.
People used to say this about energy as well, yet in the past 5-10 years, I’ve read several articles demonstrating that we appear to have decoupled energy growth from economic growth
That article is utterly unconvincing. It just handwaves the finite nature of our material reality with a very weak appeal to “infinite” human creativity. And then the conclusion is that infinite growth is necessary because there’s no way to change the status quo of wealth hoarding. It’s just apologism for the very worst aspects of capitalism without a single iota of serious thought.
I don’t think there is any hand waving. Consuming a resource is not the only factor that goes into economic growth. Can you address that point specifically?
No I won’t because it’s irrelevant if it is the only factor or not. It’s the limiting factor. Please don’t engage in red herrings.
You won’t because you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Seems that you’re the one doing the hand waving.
Who is Oliver Waters and why should I listen to them regarding economic theory? I read the post, and it reads more like a philosophical thought experiment than any applicable economics theory.
While I don’t believe someone needs a higher education degree to speak on complex topics, I’m not going to take a Medium blog post from someone who lists no demonstrable experience in theoretical or practical economics as a central source for discussions, sorry.
It’s not philosophical at all; it’s rather straightforward in its arguments, IMO. Not sure why nobody wants to discuss the points directly, and they are cogent points regardless of whose keyboard they originated. If the points made are incorrect, they should be relatively easy to refute.
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.
We don’t even have capitalism yet, what late stage are you talking about?
I guess that really depends on where you live. I can only speak on behalf of the US.
Where do you have capitalism in US? US is probably one of the most anti capitalist countries in the world right now.
Ok, buddy.
That’s not really true though and it’s anecdotal. The anti-capitalist mindset might be growing due to awareness and people suffering at the hands of capitalism (continued layoffs, increased cost of groceries and rent, union busting, worker exploitation), but that’s because of the ever-tightening squeeze of late capitalism. When you have a structure that requires infinite growth to exist, in a world with finite resources, you end up with the current state of the US.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the anti-capitalist mindset among the working class has definitely grown in the US, but at its core, the US is pro-capitalist.
Where’s US pro capitalist? It’s one of a few countries with legal corruption called lobbying, which helps big corps to shield themselves from competition. US today has a plethora of laws and regulations which create and sustain monopolies. US has whole industries created by lawmakers and completely stonewalled from anyone entering them. Capitalism my ass…
Also capitalism doesn’t require infinite growth. I don’t know where you people are getting that lunacy from.
The entire USA financial system works on the basis of capital. What the fuck are you talking about? I cannot wait to read your conspiracy theory.
What are you defining capitalism as, and what word would you use to describe our current system?
No true Scotsman.
You can read about capitalism in Wikipedia.
Most countries today move towards economical fascism, where governments exercise control over private property but do not nationalize it. Lobbying, donor interest protection, cronyism, rise of oligarchy - you can see it in many countries. And then inevitable radicalisation of the public and scapegoating everything else as the core issue. Capitalism, migrants, ecology - everything is a problem but the government.
Contemporary capitalist societies developed in the West from 1950 to the present and this type of system continues to expand throughout different regions of the world—relevant examples started in the United States after the 1950s
This Wikipedia article says that the US is a capitalist system.
Lobbying, donor interest protection, cronyism, rise of oligarchy
Where are these things listed in the article as being incompatible with capitalism, and their presence meaning it’s some other system?
Bruh, I don’t believe in late stage capitalism either but we are definitely living in capitalist economies in most of the world.
Capitalism isn’t just laissez-faire, completely free market type stuff. It’s a spectrum.
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…
You see the same shit on streaming services. “Oh this show has been out for two days and hasn’t reached Game of Thrones level of popularity already? Let’s remove it from existence forever.”
Just throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks.
Relatively cheap? Huh? At $500-$1000 they were exactly the opposite of a relatively cheap desktop machine.
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.
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.
Yeah the celeron and pentium models are amazing low power machines to run Home Assistant on. Mine is running half a dozen other docker addons including frigate to do ai object detection (offloading most of the heavy lifting to a Google coral chip plugged into usb)
Being the default industry standard meant drivers were never a hassle
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.
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.
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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.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/c/Level1Techs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
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
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.
I still appreciate the love ✌️💛
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 was just looking at buying one second hand yesterday… Better buy one before everyone ramps up their prices!
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?
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.
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.
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.
💯
Exactly. The only reason why I’m waiting for NUC12 right now. As far as my limited knowledge goes, AMD is behind here. Correct me, if I’m wrong.
I’m not too knowledgeable on the topic but I thought the amd iGPU had vce, which is a their version of quicksync?
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.
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.
Real shame. Best purchase I’ve made for running Proxmox with Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Home Assistant
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
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.
