Intel has announced it will no longer manufacture its NUC classification of MiniPCs and we have thoughts. In our consulting, we have built 3 NUCs and all of them have had hardware issues leading to either refund (or offers from Intel) or replacement.
We will not miss the NUC, but we still love the form factor and our most recent miniPC purchase was the ASUS PN50, an incredibly affordable 8-core machine running AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700U. This machine offers excellent productivity for office use and is easy to secure physically with a Kensington lock.
Intel refunded the purchase of our most recent NUC, one powered by the i5-1135G7, after it experienced some weird, intermittent graphical issues from one of the HDMI ports. It was our first machine to support 2.5 GbE and PCIe 4.0 NVMe and that made it feel quite ready for a future, despite being a 4-core part. ASUS will continue to support existing NUCs and this should take some pressure off Intel to focus on (hopefully) more reliable products.
Don’t be sad though, because the miniPC market is more competitive than ever and AMD’s new 7040-series APUs are highly potent. As we’ve mentioned previously, these are also the first to support hardware-based AV1 encoding for video. We believe that in terms of value, support, and performance, AMD’s latest APUs ultimately embarrassed the NUC.
Yet bizarrely, perhaps we should also be thankful for the NUC because it helped the market take miniPCs more seriously as a form factor. It made people want small PCs, even if we’re not certain how many of them were actual users rather than fanatical YouTubers. We love other Intel products, but for us, the NUC was far from a trouble-free experience.