I use a NUC as a daily driver. The problem with NUCs is that cooling is suboptimal, the fan is small and thus noisy. It can be fixed with a third-party case, but that's at least €60-100 more for a much slower machine. Plus, you may void the guarantee by transplanting the motherboard.

It’s a shame that ASUS cancelled the NUC Extreme line. I know it’s quite a bit bigger than other NUCs. But the 13 Extreme had expandability, good cooling, and fast CPU options.

I have i7 NUC13 mounted on a back of monitor and I can barely hear it. It's not that bad, previously (NUC7-era) it was much worse.

They're usually the same 30 - 50 watt processors used in x86 laptops, once we got past the "dual-core" ceiling they became extremely capable.

> NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT

4 cores instead of 10 cores, 69W TDP instead of 22W, UHD Graphics 730 versus Apple's 10 core GPU (0.5 TFLOPs vs about 4.3), 23% worse single core performance, 45% worse multicore, and much louder cooling.

It's not a fair comparison.

So get a stronger one. There will be always something that is better on one or another side.

I have 13th gen i7, with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB ssd (and 2.5 GbE). It was 800 EUR + VAT, last year. How much would similar Mac Mini cost?

Not a fair comparison either.

Edit: 69W for the NUC is not TDP. It is 69W power brick that ships with the machine.

what do you get in https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0 ? - m4 mini is 45 it seems.

A few more datapoints, of course completely unscientific, because why not:

                         | Firefox | Chrome | Safari |  Edge
    =====================|=========|========|========|=======
    Intel 1360P (Ubuntu) |  16.6   |  19.8  |  n/a   |  n/a
    Apple M1 (MacOS)     |  24.6.  |  26.3  |  28.5  |  28
    AMD 2920X (Fedora)   |  12.3   |  11.9  |  n/a   |  n/a
    AMD 2920X (Windows)  |  12.2   |  n/a   |  n/a   |  14.9

16.6 in Firefox, 19.8 in Chrome (Ubuntu 24.04, both browsers in flatpak).

How noisy is it?

I made a fanless NUC 7 (!) years ago with a special case, and it's perhaps due for replacement.

Still can be heard, but it is not so annoying as it was. The fan noise is, how to describe it, softer?

Comparing nuc7i7dnke to nuc13anki7.

It's almost half the price.

RAM is completely fair.

Apple is certainly out of their mind on storage. But on a desktop it’s trivial to plug-in an external disc that you can buy at an absolutely reasonable price instead of the insane Apple one.

$200 bucks for 8GB RAM extra is not fair ($200 to go to 24GB, another $200 for 32GB). 64GB DDR5 kits can be had for less than $200.

And while you can plug in storage, I think it does kind of ruin the appeal of having such a small device by having a bunch of spaghetti cables. And if the boot drive goes it's not easily replaceable and makes the machine a brick until it is.