Mini desktop computer- good or bad ?

[rfuerst911sc]

I guess I am living under a rock 😄 but just recently learned about these . Various brands are available. So what's the deal with these ? As an example found a site that sells refurbished Dell .

A gen 7 processor with 32 Meg of memory and 1 tb SSD drive . Built in wifi/Bluetooth and it sells for 300 bucks . For general home use any reason to not consider these ?

I am limping along a Toshiba laptop so eventually will have to replace . These minis are aprox 7" x 7" x 1.5" so very small footprint . Add a keyboard/mouse and a decent monitor and for 500 bucks good to go . What am I missing ?

[Zeke]

I'm not a geek by any means but if you look in a normal sized tower you will see a huge volume of nothing. Probably runs cooler. But when you consider the laptop, why not? Just not too portable.

I like the all-in-one concept of a Mac or even a HP. You looked at those? Not quite as cheap.

BTW, I only buy refurbished units.

[TimT]

I went with a NUC a few years ago when my pc died.. I have a dual monitor set up, and the NUC mounts on a VESA plate on the back of the monitor...with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse...no cables to deal with..

Got mine from SimplyNUC.

Something like this

https://simplynuc.com/product/nuc10i3fnhn-full/

[TimT]

Forgot the pic...

[rfuerst911sc]

It's funny I have rarely moved the Toshiba from the desk . So not sure portability is needed . I went away from conventional desktop PC to laptop mainly due to size . These minis seem to fix the size issue . The Toshiba would go to the man cave and be used with Durametric software for P car diagnostics.

[john70t]

What about accessories? A backup HD could be put in a drawer but would need to be plugged in frequently. DVD player. Headphones camera and mic. Memory card from camera/other.
TimT has the USB accessibility problem figured out above with the splitter dongle (great word).

[edgemar]

those mac mini's are impressive.

[stomachmonkey]

NUCS are great.

Towers are for expansion, if you don't need to add or upgrade no reason to not get a NUC.

Apples MINI is a NUC, they've been around a decade +.

[look 171]

When my trusty Mac desktop went south, my buddy who owns a mac specific tech type company sugget I get a MiniMac. IU love this thing. Huge space saving with nothing to mount or worry about but the price. Bought a 32 monitor for 150 bucks. What's not to love? Computer is like car tires. Life's too short to drive none performance tires or slow and old computers.

[edgemar]

The m2 processor for the iMac Mini is impressive.

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

NUCS are great.

Towers are for expansion, if you don't need to add or upgrade no reason to not get a NUC.

Apples MINI is a NUC, they've been around a decade +.

And to be honest when was the last time you upgraded your home PC? We had several of those tiny computers/mini-mac stuffed up behind large monitors at the museum.

[red-beard]

At this point, a NUC is pointless.

Get a modern Dell all in one. It is amazing what you can get from the Dell Outlet for $600.

[HardDrive]

imac here. Works great.

[Baz]

I got my NUC back in 2017 and it's just keeps humming along.......

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by red-beard

At this point, a NUC is pointless.

I would disagree.

NUCs still have an advantage over a traditional desktop or laptop.

For the same reason I don't buy smart tv's and use Apple TV's / Rokus.

Separate points of failure mean not having to replace it all.

NUCs make great headless units, hide them in a cabinet, stick em on a shelf, remote in from any device anywhere you are. Kind of a nod to mainframes and terminals.

[Pazuzu]

We were running Shuttle cases (about twice as thick as a NUC, but otherwise very similar) in 2001 on the telescopes. Micro-format computing is not new.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by scottmandue

And to be honest when was the last time you upgraded your home PC? We had several of those tiny computers/mini-mac stuffed up behind large monitors at the museum.

When was the last time I upgraded?

Constantly.

There is never less than 8 PC's running in my home office.

Everything from a couple of Mac Mini CI / Jenkins servers up to a Lamda Deep Learning server and various Windows / Linux / Macs in between.

[stealthn]

Yup, they are great, have many, all HP

They have the cpu, memory and everything you need. I was able to purchase a batch for our office at excellent prices.

[911 Rod]

I have 2 of these at my work. Can't see buying anything else.

[GH85Carrera]

In almost every TV show and movie the computers are laptops, and never plugged in to charge.

I do own a laptop, but it is for my travel, or work when I go along to shoot the aerial photos and the laptop runs the camera system.

My main computer is a real monster for post processing the aerial photos into final products. It is physically huge, and has two full size fast video cards, 256 Gig of RAM, 14 TB of RAID storage and a pair of M.2 SSD drives as the boot and main work drives. I built it fit my very specific needs and I spent more than my brand new 74 914 2.0 cost me.

I really don't care for laptops, as they are almost impossible to upgrade, modify or repair. The little tiny NUCs and other small computers have a place, in the world of computers, just not at my place.

My laptop is a Microsoft Surface and not that old, but it can't be upgraded to Win 11 as it does not meet the specs for running it.