Laptops > NUCs IMHO
When the price of electricity shot up last year I looked into replacing my desktops with NUCs, but I found that there is a very good second-hard market in laptops on a well-known online store. Such laptops sell for a fraction of their first-hand cost but seem to be in decent condition (not been bitten yet), they are generally more powerful than NUCs, they are much cheaper to run than desktops, and I haven't looked back. Since you're using them as desktops with external keyboards and monitors, you don't care if the screen or keyboard is faulty or if the battery life is low, so you can sometimes pick up an even more bargainacious bargain if you find one being sold as faulty. In theory NUCs should be more cost-effective than laptops because they don't need to bother with the screen, keyboard or battery, but somehow I've never found NUCs that give a decent bang for the buck. I guess they're up against the enormous economy of scale in laptop manufacturing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
