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It's interesting to hear that M.2 was the underdog in 2015. I recently built a new PC and made sure to get a motherboard with two M.2 slots precisely because of the "look ma, no cables" aspect of the connector. Even with SATA.. That's a big advantage in my book.

U.2 seems to be more popular in applications where drives may need to be changed out more frequently, like datacenters.

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If there was ever a time period where M.2 was plausibly the underdog relative to U.2, it would have been the short span of time where the only NVMe drive available at retail was an Intel enterprise drive re-labeled as an enthusiast drive. That product used a controller chip that was physically too large for a M.2 card, and far too power-hungry to feed off just a 3.3V supply.

Once Samsung M.2 PCIe drives graduated from the OEM market to the retail market and provided better real-world performance than the big power-hungry enterprise-based Intel drive, U.2 for consumers was doomed.

I bought a Z97 motherboard in late 2014 and it had an M.2 port. I don't remember seeing any consumer boards with U.2 connectors.

Yep. But SATA Express used to be common (but mostly unused) for a while.

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