A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them A year after winning the rights to build machines based on Intel's Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PC spec, Taiwan's Asus claims it has stabilized the product line and the team that makes it – and is poised to innovate. As we reported in the days after Asus took on the NUC, the manufacturer hoped to think outside the 4″ x 4″ …
> NUCs are famously used in McDonald's touchscreen self-serve kiosks in Australia
Yet it is reported: McDonald's is reassigning cashiers to other roles, including new "guest experience lead" jobs that help customers use the kiosks and assist with any issues. "In theory, kiosks should help save on labor, but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts,"
> but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts
"but in reality, restaurants are always seriously short-staffed so there is still too much work to do."
Source: Watching one poor woman at Arby's tend the drive thru, 2 lines of customers, the drinks station, and online pickup by herself. There was one bloke in the back slapping sandwiches together as fast as he could. The quality was about what you'd expect. And they wonder why they do poorly. And no, they had no self-ordering ability. She had to take every order.
Those kiosks are utterly useless, at least that are in the local MickeyD's here in LA. And thus one more reason to boycott them (and any other chain that tries to force them on their customers).
It takes several times longer for a simple order, more mistakes made in the "kitchen" and thus more aggravation when you try to actually get hold of your "food"...
But how much support are you going to get for one of them?
We've used a lot of the NUCs at work, partly because Intel has a good reputation for supporting their hardware. Whether that's warranty support for hardware, or software/firmware support that lasts for years. Plus you can almost guarantee there'll be good Linux support.
Sure, the NUCs cost more, but this is a case where you get what you pay for in terms of quality.
Hopefully Asus can keep up that reputation.
They're running an Intel CPU sure, but they're not designed and qualified by Intel. For example, an NUC is guaranteed to work between 0C and 50C outside temperature. A clone might run at 50C, but there's a good chance they cheaped out on some of the components and it might start to crash above 30C ambient. I know that an Intel wifi card is going to have drivers for every OS, and will adhere to all the specifications, but I don't have the same confidence in whatever ends up in a cheap clone. etc. etc.
If it was for a home system, I'd definitely look at an NUC clone, but when I'm going to be dealing with 100+ of them, scattered all over the country, and someone else is paying; I'll go for the Intel(Asus) one every time.
Intel will also give you enterprise grade delivery and timescale support guarantees
I need to know I can buy this model for X years and be given Y years notice of a change.
I don't get that buying clones on Aliexpress
Another big advantage of Intel - when you combine the NUC into a product and go to TUV/UL/etc they aren't going to argue with the Intels approval stickers.
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We bought one of those mini pcs with 4 NICs that is sold as a pfsense box. To run pfsense for a site. Router was located in the mail room, which is dry and sheltered but unheated.
Specification said operating temperature -20°C - 50°C. The first time the temperature dropped to below freezing we had an outage, I had to unplug it and take it to the office and stick it in front of a heater. First time I have ever given a diagnostic conclusion of "the router froze" and meant it literally... Longer term the issue was resolved with a £10 heated mat from Amazon...
There are numerous ones listed on Amazon as well. A few months ago my daughters very old Dell SFF desktop PC failed so for a little over the price of another refurbished one I got her a brand new NUC which has better connectivity and more storage. The performance isn't massively different, but it's more than enough for her use which is general internet browsing and a few online courses for her job. It's also given her quite a bit more room in the cupboard where she has it set up, and the fact that it's a generic Chinese vendor isn't an issue to us as we got our son to reformat the SSD and install Windows 10, rather than use the image which came on the device. Works perfectly and should last for quite a few years.
Yep.
Hsu said more retailers are looking for kiosks that use generative AI to handle customer inquiries with real-time conversational interfaces.
This is a load of Marketing Gobbledygook of the 1st order.
What a load of bullshite.
It means, 'we will charge you more for stuff that you won't use'.
As a NUC user (I have four of the things doing various jobs) they are nice devices because of their small size and quietness (if you get the right ones)
The last thing I need is for AI to start guessing what my NC controlled lathe is going to do and switch in the wrong tool. FSCK that for a game of soldiers.
"The server team's focus on those markets means Asus's commercial teams have a chance to learn how to better pitch NUCs beyond traditional markets like digital signage."
A NUC seems over kill for digital signage as its just running a slide show of pictures or video files on a loop, something you don't need a i5 and 16GB of RAM to do. Surely a Raspberry Pi could do that for a lot less upfront cost and power usage?
You must be joking. Sure the Pis are not as performant but they are significantly more reliable than NUCs. You never need to reboot the Pis. You might get something similar if you run linux on the NUCs, but Intel CPUs are crap. With the whole 13 and 14th gen debacle, people are forgetting that Intel's 11 gen are equally unstable. I learned that the hard way with my ASROCK NUC running Intel i5. Constant reboots the moment you want to do something useful. I had to fight for a RMA. And guess what? The replacement NUC does the same think, BSOD and reboots.
Why don't you reread what I wrote? I'm not arguing for Intel's chips, merely pointing out the demands of industrial use. Personally, I think the RPi4's are more suited to embedded situations than any x86-
I have a fair few Pi's around the house: great little machines and generally pretty reliable, assuming they have a good power supply. However, that's a far cry from sticking them in an industrial environment with highly variable temperature and humidity and air quality. It's possible that someone now offers them in suitable cases and guaranteed for say -20°C to +50°C and humidity > 80% and perhaps EM interference. Now, depending on your use case, you might be able to accept downtime due to conditions, but if not you'll generally try and source from someone who is prepared to guarantee the hardware.
Methinks it'll be more like "Why has this burger got pickles in it, I ordered it without pickles?" and "Why is there no option on this touchscreen to choose extra sauces? I always used to be able to ask for those!"
To which it will reply with, variously, "We're sorry for the quality control issue you've experienced today. Please fill in this form for a refund. Note: no keyboard will be provided, please "write" in the boxes and we will translate your handwriting into text" and "We're sorry for the experience you've had today. Please fill in this form to request a new feature for the kiosks. Note: no keyboard will be provided, please "write" in the boxes and we will translate your handwriting into text"
And then the OCR frustrates people with it's inaccuracies to the point where they give up and go away.
When ordering in Burger King IT is constantly making inquiries at YOU. Are you sure you don't want that large? Do you want these optional Extras? How about some sauce (that the opposition gives away for free) with that? I swear they don't really want customers and are trying to annoy them into going elsewhere instead.
Bring back human staff!
NUC's are very over priced.
I can purchase an ASUS NUC from Ebuyer for £471 which has nothing but the case, motherboard, processor (AMD) and power supply.
For £549 i can get the equivalent processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16" 1920x1200 screen, keyboard, microphone, camera, PSU, Windows 11. (Dell laptop)
That extra £78 buys a lot more.
It depends on your use case though.
I recently bought a Geekom NUC clone for <£400 - complete with Windows 11 - in favour of simply re-purposing an arguably higher-spec HP laptop. My use case was wanting something as small as possible to sit under the TV and act as a home entertainment PC.
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