But this is exactly my point. Apple is optimizing the wrong things (for me) because it's trying to build Cool New Things rather than things that are actually useful. My NUC looks perfectly fine, and it sits under my desk so no one ever sees it anyway. It is superior to a Mac Mini in every conceivable way. It's smaller and it costs less for the same tech specs. The only thing that a NUC doesn't do that a Mini does is run MacOS legally.
It's doubly frustrating, because Intel does basically all the work for them (even designing some of their NUCs to match a Mac Mini size and power/thermal limits). Apple could just ride the Intel product roadmap each year, with very little effort, and people would be happy enough.
But Apple can't be bothered to do even that.
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In comparison, Intel basically made a "Mac Mini Pro" called the Hades Canyon NUC. Which is roughly the same price as a high-end Mac Mini, but has 2x-6x the compute power (depending on how you'd like to measure it). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
My NUC11Pro has 64GB of RAM and 2x SSD, and is way smaller than Mac Mini. Not sure why Apple thinks they need to dumb down smallest form factor for market segmentation reasons.
The Mac Minis are a great value compared to the rest of Apple's lineups. The NUC is overpriced, like why would I get that instead of a generic laptop? It was just a poor value for what it offered.
As much as I love using MacOS, the Intel NUCs offer upgradability for SSD and RAM which makes it harder to go with the Mac Mini if you need larger storage or memory.
"But the striking thing to me is just how much smaller the Intel NUC is."
Add the volume of the NUC's hideous and ungainly power supply brick. Then make your judgement on size.
If you've taken a mini apart, you'd see that the easiest way volume could be significantly reduced is by replacing the space for two 3.5" drives with space for one modern NVME gum stick - a trick which the already NUC does thanks to its being developed more recently.
The mini has Thunderbolt and and digital audio in/out. The NUC has neither of these.
If you compare the interior of the mini and the NUC, the NUC does not stand out as an marvel of engineering or miniaturization.
Why would it not get smaller? Intel makes their NUCs the size that they are because that's the size of the components these days.
It's not like Apple's going to make the new Mac Mini three times the size it needs to be and stuff a bunch of 3.5" HDD bays in for people who want to use it as a file server.
Smaller with fewer components and everything soldered/glued together is a cheap way to build smaller and cheaper at the cost or repairability, and Apple clearly doesn't care about repairability. They've said that the Mac Pro redesign will be more modular, but I don't see them doing that here.
The Mac Mini is using full desktop components, not NUC laptop components. That's why it supports 4 times as much RAM, Thunderbolt 3, and a 65 watt CPU compared to the 25 watt NUCs.
It's been a number of years (the Intel NUC was a new product) since our office bought its first Mac mini. At that time, it was the only product that fit the requirements of size, performance and cooling, and even then was cheaper than many alternatives which weren't as good a fit. Today, there are quite a number of products, including gamer or workstation-class machines, in this form factor. What was once exotic for its compactness is a commodity. All-the-while, Apple has kept this product at a near-standstill. Almost certainly they're worried about cannibalizing their iMac line, or even the Mac Pro line. Given the level of innovation that has take place over the last five years, the remarkable thinness of laptops which Apple helped pioneer beginning with the Air, why aren't they putting out a Mac mini the size and thickness of a slice of bread?
I think this is a topic about which people can reasonably disagree :-)
I'll just add that my complaint about inability to upgrade does not just apply to laptops. It's the whole product line (other than the Pro) including the Mini and the iMac. If I have an iMac and I need more RAM, I have to throw out a perfectly good SSD, processor, and display. There is just no excuse for that. I have a NUC that is essentially a hardware equivalent of a (pre-M1) Mini. The NUC is both smaller than a Mini and upgradable so I know it's possible.
True, if you ignore the difference in terms of UI/UX. For me, MacOS is the killer feature. Hard to estimate the price but still worth to buy a Mac Mini over a NUC. Hackintosh is not something I would like to waste time on.
What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.
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