Good riddance, I've had nothing but trouble with NUCs, like memory errors from the CPU cache, and Intel wouldn't support it or help in any way. Another example, having to hotplug thunderbolt devices after boot due to IRQ conflicts, Intel's tech was clueless, even after escalating.
interesting (and disappointing!) to see the opposite perspective of my own experience with NUCs. i've owned 3x, all still in-use with no real problems. my use-case: 2x are headless ESXi, 1x is daily, was Windows 10 for a while after purchase, then Fedora.
with that said, i have tended to purchase the top or second-to-top model from the previous generation of NUC. i wonder if that is why i've had such good luck? drivers/issues of the older models sorted out the problems?
i have had similar luck with cars: purchasing the last year of a model range has reaped similar dividends (as opposed to purchasing the first year of a new model range).
When NUCs appeared they were the only player in that field; now if you search for "mini pc" at any vendor you're submerged by the amount of products, of which NUCs are only a small and more expensive fraction. Intel can't compete anymore with other manufacturers and abandoned the market, but the form factor is stronger than ever and demand may only rise in the future with faster and less power hungry CPUs. For office usage, and generally where is no need for adding PCIe cards or very high speeds (read: heat dissipation), they're already dominant in many places: I was just back from a real estate agents office in which all PCs in sight were Lenovo mini PCs fixed on the back of their monitors, the supermarkets I shop from all use mini PCs by other brands, as does my bank and a lot of other stores and businesses I visit. My own media player is a unlocked Chromebox reflashed with LibreElec. One should rather wonder how much until Mini PCs can also mount very high end GPUs so that they can be adopted by the gaming community and other niches where speed is a must.
