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.
Relatively cheap? Huh? At $500-$1000 they were exactly the opposite of a relatively cheap desktop machine.
There was a great resale market for them. I got an i7 8th gen for about $200-300 new when the 10th gen came out. It was clearly never used overstock that a reseller picked up cheap. Its a champ of a machine, still going strong.
They also made cheap celeron models that sold in the $100-200 range that were 5x as powerful as the raspi that would normally fill the niche.
Yeah the celeron and pentium models are amazing low power machines to run Home Assistant on. Mine is running half a dozen other docker addons including frigate to do ai object detection (offloading most of the heavy lifting to a Google coral chip plugged into usb)
Being the default industry standard meant drivers were never a hassle
IKR? For what they wanted I could get a faster full size machine with better expandability. I get the value in a small box, but unless you had some commercial application or wanted some special architectural aesthetic in your home that required that size, it was a waste of money.