Not all mini PCs ship as complete systems more so than any other class of PC, they tend not to.Įspecially in the case of Intel's NUC kits, Shuttle's small PCs, and many of Zotac's Zboxes, you get what amounts to a PC kit: a tiny chassis with a motherboard pre-installed. Should You Buy Bare Bones or Ready-Configured? Like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, it received Apple's homegrown M1 processor, greatly increasing its performance.
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On the macOS side of things, the venerable Apple Mac Mini is a sleek, square silver box with rounded edges that saw a big update in late 2020. Shuttle, too, is another small-PC pioneer, offering machines in a host of shapes. Zotac, a major player in small PCs (and one of the category's unsung early innovators), offers a huge range of Zbox PCs that range in size from a fat smartphone to a bulky Discman. Separate from those is a host of PCs that are undeniably small but follow their own shape and size rules.
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While it's technically a mini PC, full retail models from partners, such as the Razer Tomahawk, can be much larger than the small square boxes we're used to associating with NUCs. The NUC 9 was a new mini-PC platform that Intel is encouraging partner manufacturers to utilize for many different types of PCs, based on a core-computing module called the Compute Element.
The NUC PCs and their ilk tend to be around 5 or 6 inches square, though Intel's 2020 NUC 9 Extreme (followed on by a 2021 NUC 11 Extreme version) changes this somewhat. The chip giant has released a series of NUC-branded mini-PC kits in its own line, and several of the traditional PC-component makers have followed suit with similar models (Asus with its VivoMini line, and Gigabyte with its Brix models, for example). The models next up in size are a bit more dynamic, a bunch we might term the "NUC class." NUC stands for "Next Unit of Computing," a longtime initiative by Intel to spur the development of very small Windows-based desktop PCs using its mobile-centric processors. A few vendors (notably, Azulle) still make them, though. You can still find them on the market, but they have failed to have a major impact. These are really only suitable for display/signage use or extremely basic applications, and after a promising debut a several years back, have not seen all that much evolution or momentum. The very smallest PCs might be termed the "stick class," vanguarded by the Atom-CPU-powered Intel Compute Stick we first reviewed in early 2015 (and again in its refreshed, Cherry Trail Atom and Core m3 forms in 2016), followed by similar sticks from Asus, Azulle, Lenovo, and others.
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Mini PCs: How to Define Degrees of 'Small'Īs a result, we're seeing some clear stratification in the market for tiny desktop PCs. You need to leave some space for ports to plug in a thing or two. Nowadays, small-ification is getting to the point where you can't go all that much smaller.
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