Ha, yeah, I was going to say... the writing was sadly pretty much on the wall for a while it seemed like. SimplyNUC (led by ex-Intel NUC guys) will still be chugging on, but for enterprise/business use, personally I actually recommend looking at "industrial" models as well. While there are no guarantees for the business continuing, and they're not always cutting edge, these version typically have 5yr EOLs for each model. For those interested, "embedded 4x4" is a good search term and and you'll get a number of options. ASRock, Sapphire, Advantech, etc have all been around for decades.
asus has apparently been heavily involved for a long time. some of the recent nucs supposedly had "powered by asus" or something on one of the screens apparently. So this is more just finalizing the terms of the handover.
Not that it doesn't mean Asus won't change the product eventually. Again, NUC in many ways was a very polished and premium product, and usually it was relatively expensive for what you got (which in a NUC7i7 was only a 2C4T!). Skull Canyon was Crystal Well 6775R 4C8T. But you got very premium features like M.2 and Thunderbolt and dual NICs on some of the products, and the atoms were very cheap for throwaway uses. Will Asus keep doing that? I saw the cute rebrand of PN50 4800U/4600U/4400U to PN51 5700U/5500U/5300U (which are still zen2!) and it soured me on their handling of their mini-pcs.
that started me looking at the rando chinese brand alternatives, and none of those seem to be very refined.
> For those interested, "embedded 4x4" is a good search term
nice tip, didn't know this one!
aliexpress has some weird stuff. there's C3750 5x10gbe SFP (or something) soft-switches and 6x 2.5GbE (225v3 or 226) 1165g7 soft-switches (which sadly don't support ECC!) etc. I almost think sometimes they just throw together random shit they have cheaply. Here's some... C3750 and intel X510 or X520? poof it's a switch.
Sadly there is a lack of NAS chassis type stuff. You'd think cutting into Synology/QNAP's gig would be profitable. Can't even buy barebones NAS chassis for your own build in most cases, the one I've used is U-NAS 810A but there's some things I'm not fond of with it too.
Asrock Rack and Supermicro both have a lot of good shit for whitebox nerd shit though. Shoutout to HDPLEX and Akasa too (and these guys make stuff for NUCs too).
One other cool thing you can find on Aliexpress is the Asrock X300TM, which is an embedded-market-only thin-ITX board with no chipset, just running off the Ryzen SOC. And thin-ITX actually is designed to be powered off an external 19v brick if you want, and it actually uses Intel cooler pattern (which opens up compatibility with some smaller/lower-profile stuff.
