With one of the third party cases, such as those from Akasa, they are nice inexpensive fanless machines with excellent Linux support and low power consumption.
for who accept Chinese brands (and suspicious Windows license): Beelink, Minisforum, etc
the rest: ECS Liva or ASRock DeskMini?
Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low noise!
I’ve got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It’s competitive with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.
Intel NUC is the BMW of mini PCs, certainly not "inexpensive" compared to the alternatives, even if we ignore the off-brand stuff.
NUC and their ilk were a game changer and I'm glad to see a way for them to continue.
Personally, I bought a cheap fanless Chinese (Topton) router (N5105, 4xi225v3) system from AliExpress running OPNsense that's worked flawlessly for the past year or so, but I'd recommend ordering your minipcs through a vendor where you can easily return it (like Amazon) if it's DOA or otherwise doesn't meet your expectations. I'd also skip the small Chinese vendors if warranty support is something you need. Go with a manufacturer that has a local office/support.
Also, depending on what you want your server for, if you want ECC, your minipc options will be extremely limited (a couple Xeon options when I looked). Personally, I went with an desktop Ryzen + ASRock Rack mini-ITX board in a slim case that was still pretty small since I wanted ECC for ZFS.
I do wish there were one of them that included even two 3.5" drive bays so it can run as a forbidden home server doing all the things.
Yes many alternatives cost less, but if you want to tape them to the back of a TV that generates heat and has to be turned on 24/7 to display advertisements, video,..., they were cheapest by far.
Or in meeting rooms to display zoom/teams, ... A raspberry pi just doesn't handle those scenario's
Perhaps my failure rate is just high, but micro-mini systems for that use case were much more reliable for me over long time frames.
Paying extra for reliability is absolutely worth it.
The Intel NUC Celeron systems could not be met for price if you also needed Windows. To beat the NUC Celeron on price you had to drop to ARM and use Linux but if the software you needed to run only supported Windows that was not an option.
the Celeron NUC's where GREAT for Line of Business use cases where the computer was running a Screen, or Single windows Application
I 100% agree that it’s not the technically optimal solution. But don’t discount the idea that, given an existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be the local optima organizationally.
The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and they just worked even if you didn't have the most experienced staff supporting them or the best software running on them.
If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.
I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would probably be my default for something like this in volume. ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless you're doing something special that requires something from their vendor branch.
For one of them we had to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a small NUC to display a page with 3-6 videos running. The pi could show 1 or 2 videos but with all 6 going, it was very stuttery playback.
1. LoB apps need to be run not just on a computer that only shows a screen, but in other contexts, there is no reason to develop a whole new app just for that purpose.
2. Developers who are only used to working with Win API's like WPF, DotNet, etc. or other frameworks that are windows only Why would we want to employ whole new dev team just to maintain that app separate from the apps that run on our Laptops and normal computers
3. Management Tools. If my entire fleet of computers is managed by ConfigMgr and controlled by Group Policy and Compliance Setting why would I want to spin up a completely separate management system like Ansible or something just to control these machines when I could have them integrated into my existing tool set of which my helpdesk and everyone else is trained to use?
I can probably come up with 5 or 10 more reasons
It's a good machine technically speaking: perfect for lightweight gaming, office stuff, browsing, etc. But I suspect that a comparable mini PC from asian vendors would be twice as cheap and just as good. A laptop would be even easier.
Just pointing out that "cheap" is not the best description of these things :-)
https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim/ds20u7
A drawback is that Shuttle has less frequent updates than the NUC, and it's harder to find them in local stores.
But the akasa line is pretty interesting if a bit more diy.