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.
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…
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.”
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
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.
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?
What are you defining capitalism as, and what word would you use to describe our current system?
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Probably because people aren’t spending their money on it.
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.
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.
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 were too pricy for me. I ended up with Bee-link machines (SER4/5/5Pro) and am happy with them.
Oh man i was thinking of getting one of these to replace my raspberry pi
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.
They’re not a lot bigger than a NUC. My HP mini PC’s footprint is like 8"x8"
And NUCs are usually 4x4. That’s literally half the footprint.
Edit: a quarter of the size. This is why I don’t do math before coffee.
Maybe ironically with the prices dropping on these people will actually buy them…
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…
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, I’m not watching Tek Syndicate content.
Point is not who made it, but the PC. Here’s the pure link since clicking on video description was too hard: https://www.bee-link.com/catalog/product/index?id=493
Maybe it doesn’t matter to you but it does to me. I’m subscribed and watch Level1 videos so I still remember the mess Logan caused. They had a nice channel that could be even better today but he fucked it up.
(thanks for the link, though)
I do remember there was some drama, but to be honest I never followed them nor do I follow now. Saw the video some days ago, found hardware presented interesting and shared that. That about sums it up.
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
Sad really, but the issue, as someone as mentioned already is they were too expensive.
