For a lot of applications this is really not competitive. You can get an Intel/AMD mini PC on Amazon for a little over $100 these days, running fully supported Linux.
Do you understand that these boards are the size of a credit card? Those mini PCs are far larger than these. I can take a Raspberry Pi and stick it inside a picture frame, for instance. I actually built an e-reader using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Even a full size Raspberry Pi would have fit in the case...an x86 'mini-PC' would not. Sure, I could probably get something x86 that would, but I'd have to spend a ton of money (like hundreds of thousands or millions)
If you rip the motherboard out of a NUC you'll probably end up with a board of a very similar size. The laptop style cooler takes up more space than the board.
The dimensions are different (more square, more USB ports, no GPIO) but they're not as big as you may think. A NUC is about twice the size of a Beaglebone with much better performance and software support, plus the advantage of being able to pick your own RAM and storage options.
For something like a picture frame you can easily use a NUC. For an e-reader you'd run into form factor issues for the cooler, but for something that low spec an ESP32 would be even more compact without sacrificing much.
But the void has been already filled if by Minisforum and many others.
I just got an N100, Dual NIC, 8GRam, 256G mSata SSD with a 9W TDP for AUD $270.
I have quite a few NUCs, and they are awesome. It's a shame Intel is getting out of the platform. But, for the money this one I got last week is incredible.
It's surprisingly fast and runs on the smallest plugpack I ever saw for a full PC (and it's probably hollow).
Running Linux of course. Installed Bookwork and everything works.
That's why I said "for a lot of applications" instead of "all applications". Many people buy these ARM boards for regular computing roles, such as file server, game emulation etc. And even in embedded roles, sometimes the application can accommodate the slightly increased size, with the MASSIVE advantage of using widely available builds and commodity PC hardware.
That depends, something like this 'GMKTec'[1] is Intel, and not really any bigger than an RPi 4 in a case? Obviously you can get smaller with an RPi Zero W, but in a case it'd still be half as big.
