It hasn't been quite 24 hours since the news broke, but I'm going to pour one out for the mighty—and mighty influential—Intel NUC. (Granted, it’s just going to be a cup of jasmine tea, but hey, it's the start of the work day, and the sentiment is there.)
I've reviewed more than a few NUCs in my day, such as this day and this day and this day. We ran an interview with the Intel NUC team a few years back. And plenty more NUC reviews are lost to the ravages of internet time, in websites relegated to the Wayback Machine, and in print magazines that no longer exist. So it's with a tinge of sadness that I saw the announcement today by Intel that it is no longer investing in its branded NUC line of mini PCs. The precise way the chip giant put it…
"We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth. This decision will not impact the remainder of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX) businesses. Furthermore, we are working with our partners and customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all our current commitments—including ongoing support for NUC products currently in market."
In short: The Intel NUC as a brand, if not as an idea, has begun its slow fade into history. But that corporate-speak epitaph buries a lot of influence and innovation in a brief paragraph.
The First Mainstream Mighty Minis
The NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) line was originally conceived—as the acronym suggests—as a showcase for Intel chip technology, and what could be done with it in forward-looking designs. Intel, of course, has been the major player in PC chips for many a decade. But when it rolled out its first NUC mini desktop in late 2012, it was intended to show its PC-maker partners what else they could do with Intel's low-power mobile processors. It was revolutionary in its time, though it’s hard to believe that that time was a mere 10 years ago. Even to an industry veteran, it seems like the NUC has always been around. (Here’s Intel’s Ark timeline of all its NUC models.)
Intel, for the longest time, was of course the king of the PC desktop, with only perfunctory competition from the likes of AMD and short-lived, way-back-when efforts by Cyrix and a few others. For ages, you could put a fiery, full-fat desktop chip in a big tower or a wide desktop PC, and of course, system makers would integrate Intel’s lower-powered x86 chips in countless laptops. That was the state of play for years. But what if you put one of the latter in a tiny case, and created a whole new class of just-good-enough desktop?
That's what the early NUCs did—with laptop Core chips and light-hitting Atom and Celeron CPUs—and they were a revelation. Having just enough connectivity for a keyboard, a mouse, and a peripheral or two, and a small-enough shell to mount behind a monitor, the Intel NUC became a darling of a whole host of different niches. They were ideal for call centers, kiosk integrations, digital signage, space-strapped cube-farm workplaces, and DIY projects. They also made for excellent little basic desktops if you happened to have a spare monitor hanging around. Voila: You could turn one into something of a knocked-together all-in-one PC in a jiffy, and on the cheap.
Now, the NUCs were not the very first compact desktops, by any means; makers like Shuttle and Zotac were already in the market when the NUCs arrived. But the NUCs gave it fuel; PC manufacturers took a hint, and before long they were experimenting with consumer and business variants on the NUC. Some were much bigger than Intel's original conception; some were even smaller. In a sense, the trajectory started by the NUC took desktop small-ification to its greatest extreme in the form of the stick PCs of the mid-2010s. Surprise, surprise! Even though those are marginal today, they had their origins in another Intel-spurred NUC-alike initiative, the Intel Compute Stick, powered by the company’s extreme-low-power Atom and short-lived Core m3 and m5 processors, which could work in such small confines.
The NUC Grows Out of Its Niche
Lots of people admired the NUC in its heyday, and these little dynamos had something of a following (even some NUC blogs, and at least one major dedicated reseller, SimplyNUC, which must be in mourning today). But realistically speaking, as time went on, many OEM compact PCs out-NUC-ed the NUC; they were better values.
The NUC, with few exceptions, was seldom the cheapest option in its class when bought in onesies and twosies. NUCs tended to be purchased in bulk by businesses and in vertical markets, configured to order en masse. Intel would offer both pre-configured and bare-bones versions of its NUCs, but the latter were seldom a great value, though they were little tech marvels. You had to add your own OS and third-party storage and memory, and could not rely on the economies of scale that a PC OEM or integrator could provide. Still, bought singly, they were superb hobbyist systems, and market trend-setters.
Of course, Intel having created a robust ecosystem of NUC-alikes for other PC makers to follow, it was inevitable that the paradigm would have to change. In the NUC’s later years, we would see the Pro models, equipped with higher-powered processors, often in slightly thicker chassis, made bigger to accommodate the greater thermal dissipation required or to house 2.5-inch drives. A passively cooled NUC popped up, too. And Intel surprised us all with a unique NUC experiment, the “Hades Canyon” NUC8i7HVK. The “Hades” was appropriate—for the heresy!—with an Intel CPU and a discrete AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU in a single thin NUC with a then-new flattish form factor.
And don’t forget the newest reinvention of the NUC, the NUC Extremes, the bulkiest NUCs ever by far, able to accommodate discrete graphics cards. When they debuted, some vowed that Intel and the NUC had lost their way; what made the NUC unique was its original emphasis on ultra-compactness. How could a shoebox-size PC still be a NUC? These big new NUCs, which could take third-party graphics cards, were seen by some as a wholesale dilution of the NUC concept. (Mind you, they were excellent compact systems, but were they really NUCs at all? That was the contention.)
After all, small form factor desktops with discrete graphics were well-established things by the time of the first NUC Extreme. And really, the NUC Extremes were more of a show-off platform for Intel's Compute Element, a modular system-on-a-card concept that never really gathered much steam. But they were a sign that the "Next Unit of Computing" needed to look further forward than its origins.
The NUC’s Big Legacy? The Small PCs That Followed
It's the little NUCs that will have the lasting legacy. Visit any PC retailer and look at the desktop selection. Exhibit one: The Apple Mac mini. Dell still has its compact OptiPlexes Micros for business. Asus sells a variety of mini PCs up and down the price scale. HP and Lenovo have experimented with compacts on both the consumer side and the business side. Taiwanese component makers MSI and Gigabyte have respectively made their own lines of NUC-style minis in the form of the Cubi and Brix. Zotac’s Zbox mini PCs, precursors to the NUC, soldier on. Google’s own paean to, and evolution of, the NUC exists in the form of the Chromebox, another niche, NUC-adjacent mini PC that’s being carried on by the likes of Acer and Asus.
And go to Amazon.com: With just a quick hunt, you'll find a whole host—maybe better to call it a "messy explosion"—of inexpensive mini PCs. They bring to mind the name-salad jumble of shopping for a keyboard or a robot vacuum: hordes of little Windows desktops from companies with seemingly randomized names, sold on the cheap. Acedigital, AWOW, Beelink, Bmax, Geekom, Kamrui, Morefine. (Morefine? Morphine?) If you’re looking just for a basic model, the mini PC pioneered by the NUC has been reduced to the status of an interchangeable peripheral.
Of course, the cheapest of those NUC-like mini PCs you see for a couple of hundred bucks are only suited for running a light-hitting app or two, running display signage, or powering a point-of-sale screen. Many use poky eMMC storage instead of real SSDs, and chug along on just 4GB memory instead of the 8GB or more you want in a proper, everyday productivity PC. But their existence proves that the NUC concept has matured to the point where the original has little left to say: It has become a commodity item. That’s both a testament to the NUC’s original designers, and to what the market will do with a successful idea. It’s the greatest praise, but it's also the end of the line for the original.
So, in a way, today the NUC has come full circle. (Yes, yes, I know: even though most of them are squares.) Its life journey as a product concept is complete. New NUC releases may be a thing of the past, but the NUC’s progeny is going strong and showing no signs of disappearing. The biggest question the NUC leaves behind: What will the next Next Unit of Computing be? Whether it will be Intel, or someone else, that has the answer remains to be seen.