Jesus Christ. Why does it feel like tech industry is just getting shittier and more expensive, while all the cool consumer options are being axed. Intel Nucs were a relatively cheap way to get a cute little desktop machine or a home server. I am sad that they're going away. I guess there's always Minisforum, but still...
Yeah this part bothers me. To these companies a solid profit stream is not viable. It has to be iPhone level growth year after year or they think it’s failing and axe it. It’s quite annoying. Eventually you will hit a plateau. That just means it’s a mature market, not failing. Grrrr…
You see the same shit on streaming services. "Oh this show has been out for two days and hasn't reached Game of Thrones level of popularity already? Let's remove it from existence forever."
Capitalism is unsustainable. We're seeing what happens in late capitalism. The belts tighten, the workers get left in the dust, the products consumers actually want get the axe.
Most countries today move towards economical fascism, where governments exercise control over private property but do not nationalize it. Lobbying, donor interest protection, cronyism, rise of oligarchy - you can see it in many countries. And then inevitable radicalisation of the public and scapegoating everything else as the core issue. Capitalism, migrants, ecology - everything is a problem but the government.
Contemporary capitalist societies developed in the West from 1950 to the present and this type of system continues to expand throughout different regions of the world—relevant examples started in the United States after the 1950s
This Wikipedia article says that the US is a capitalist system.
Lobbying, donor interest protection, cronyism, rise of oligarchy
Where are these things listed in the article as being incompatible with capitalism, and their presence meaning it's some other system?
That's not really true though and it's anecdotal. The anti-capitalist mindset might be growing due to awareness and people suffering at the hands of capitalism (continued layoffs, increased cost of groceries and rent, union busting, worker exploitation), but that's because of the ever-tightening squeeze of late capitalism. When you have a structure that requires infinite growth to exist, in a world with finite resources, you end up with the current state of the US.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the anti-capitalist mindset among the working class has definitely grown in the US, but at its core, the US is pro-capitalist.
Where's US pro capitalist? It's one of a few countries with legal corruption called lobbying, which helps big corps to shield themselves from competition. US today has a plethora of laws and regulations which create and sustain monopolies. US has whole industries created by lawmakers and completely stonewalled from anyone entering them. Capitalism my ass...
Also capitalism doesn't require infinite growth. I don't know where you people are getting that lunacy from.
Infinite growth is not a core part of capitalism. You're right there. But do you know what is? Pursuit of profit. And do you know what leaves dollar signs in companies eyes? Pursuing infinite growth. Infinite growth results in infinite capital, in theory. Such growth is not a requirement of capitalism, but it is the logical conclusion when you throw sustainability out of the window. And boy, do we know that corps love doing that!
You summarized the infinite growth aspect better than I did. This is exactly what I was referring to. Thank you!
I’m not sure where they are getting their info or how the US isn’t a capitalist hellscape. The US in its current state is exactly what happens when capitalism reaches a boiling point because all of the people driving it pursue infinite growth with zero accountability.
Laws and regulations that allow capitalists to continue their pursuit of infinite growth. One of the definitions of capitalism is simply:
The concentration or massing of capital in the hands of a few
This is like a 1:1 definition of what we have in the US today, and our government enables, protects, and benefits from it. It’s “late” capitalism because it’s grown into a completely unsustainable system.
Late capitalism is the acceleration of growth and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, with various crises being the result (layoffs, inflated prices, union busting, cuts in safety—e.g train derailments, etc).
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.
Yeah, mini-computers are one thing, but the NUCs were more than that. Having a PCI-E card that you can slot into your computer to literally run a PC inside your PC is super unique and not something anyone else offers.
Sad to see them drop this. I can understand that it's not an in-demand market segment, but it was cool none-the-less
Having a PCI-E card that you can slot into your computer to literally run a PC inside your PC is super unique and not something anyone else offers
My hope has been from the start that that product line would lead to some compute module-style clustering motherboards for really clean & compact x86 clusters. It would especially make sense for dedicated server/VPS providers which already rely on similar dense blade systems from Supermicro.
Imagine a box that would take 3 of them, give each a PCIe slot and an NVMe slot, and an then give you 3 power buttons, 3 sets of IO and maybe an integrated network switch so you only need 1 Ethernet cable to connect the swarm to your network. That would be useful not just for clustering in homelabs and SOHO but also for offices and such if they want to reduce the physical footprint of their PCs while maintaining pretty good serviceability for "go swap this PC out" scenerios
According to The Register's piece, Intel sales were around 10 million NUCs in 10 years. I guess they don't count other companies' sales for that, despite using intel CPUs?
Oh lort. You just gave me flashbacks. One of my kids bought one of those $200 Chuwi laptops and it would barf all over itself about once a month, so badly it would require a reinstall.
Chip shortage. Since COVID, chip companies have been having a really hard time getting properly restocked. This impacts all electronics industries. Cars, computers, even Apple had to redesign some of their products to accommodate the shortages, so has many other companies big and small. The Raspberry Pi prices have soared. So products that take a chip away from a more mainstream or lucrative market are being axed.
There’s a chip shortage.
Most people just use web based apps, so stay on their phones / cheap laptops
Enthusiasts usually just build their own machines.
Everything is more expensive.
The list goes on
These are amazing. Dell, Lenovo and I think HP made these tiny things and they were so much easier to get than Pi's during the shortage. Plus they're incredibly fast in comparison.