I used to feel the same way about kiosks, POS terminals, etc. but… if you have an organization whose bread & butter is C# desktop apps and Windows development and they’re looking for, say, qty 10 units, you’ll have a really hard time justifying the training and NRE costs to do anything but Windows.

I 100% agree that it’s not the technically optimal solution. But don’t discount the idea that, given an existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be the local optima organizationally.

Yup, exactly this. I tried deploying such system on low powered ARM systems that could technically do it. It was a nightmare from a support and compatibility standpoint. Also the vendor would support the hardware for significantly less time than Intel would support their NUCs.

The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and they just worked even if you didn't have the most experienced staff supporting them or the best software running on them.

If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

> If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would probably be my default for something like this in volume. ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless you're doing something special that requires something from their vendor branch.