Product-Market Misfit 🧩

The thing about the mini PC market is that the space is interesting and exciting, but it was a lot more interesting and exciting when people could afford to get decent components for not a lot of money.

People realize the market sucks right now, and many are staying out of it. Case in point: A recent analysis from Gartner has found that the PC industry has dropped by 22.4% in the third quarter of 2026 compared to where it was a year prior.

The reason? You guessed it: Component costs. Not really a surprise, but still a deep bummer. All the major PC makers, which by and large do not include mini PC favorites like Geekom and Minisforum, saw drops. HP, the world’s second-largest PC manufacturer, saw shipments drop by 30% year over year. Lenovo, the largest, dropped by 22.4%. And Dell saw its sales plummet by a quarter.

The long and short of it is that it’s a bad time to be a fan of tech. Not particularly a surprise, but mini PCs were once a great respite for people in search of low-cost computing options, but now have become more of a minor one.

And yet, there seems to be a misunderstanding of the market from these large companies where the mini PC can come in handy. Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops are certainly interesting, but they feel like they’ve overestimated exactly how many people are going to be doing local AI runs on their laptop in the company’s effort to catch up to the MacBook Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLNG9bkvAg

Creators focused on the space have expressed outright bewilderment at the decision to aim upscale with these new laptops. On last week’s WAN Show, Linus Media Group co-founder Luke Lafreniere made an excellent point about these machines:

You might even remember this conversation, but I was like, ”I just don’t understand like why this is a laptop.” I would rather just like run this stuff at home and like remotely access it or whatever, but I made the comparison to old super-thick gaming laptops and just like, I didn’t get those either. This kind of feels like it’s in that category where like I would just literally rather this be somewhere else, and like I can understand this in a like mini PC format sitting somewhere else far more than I can understand it in a laptop.

This feels like an excellent read of the situation. Recently, I’ve been compiling some rust code on my laptop in an attempt to contribute to the PhotoCraft project. And while the process has been fun, I’ve found myself kind of going nuts because the processing is happening locally, rather than on a mini PC. That means it’s eating up all my processing horsepower when I would probably be better off putting that energy elsewhere.

It’s worth keeping in mind that using tools like Parsec or RustDesk (for remote access) and Tailscale (for remote shell access), you literally do not need to have a super-powerful box in your lap. Sure, there are use cases where you might want processing power on your local machine, but if you’re slinging code or managing an agent, it’s a weird fit at best.

I have an old HP machine that’s nine years old and has a pretty sharp 4K screen. It’s a waste that said 4K screen isn’t usable. But keeping an older machine around but able to access some mini PC firepower? That’s a smart play. (Computers shaped like bar mats? Maybe not.)

Hot-Plugging

The week security exploits dominated the news

Maybe you were like me the other day, updating lots of machines all at once because a pair of massive PHP exploits leaked before they were supposed to be officially announced. Or maybe you saw what happened this morning, where a bunch of Linux security holes were disclosed on the wrong mailing list.

For mini PC users, issues like these are not trivial, especially if you’re running a lot of Docker images or running, say, a WordPress site on your stack. I personally spent a good part of Wednesday updating services I self-host to ensure they aren’t running outdated PHP versions. And, well … some were better about it than others. It took Ubuntu a couple of hours to update its apt repositories, but brew, an essential command line tool for Macs that is also popular with immutable distros like Bazzite, took nearly five hours to share the new PHP.

Which is to say that you were likely scrambling to ensure your setup was in working order this week, especially if you float across different versions of Linux. (Still haven’t done so? Go here to learn what you need to do next.)

It’s enough to make you give up, much like eMudhra did when its embarrassingly short TLS certificates were exposed to the broader internet. I saw some takes out there that defended the concept of software as a service in light of these security issues, notably from Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk. But I think that if you’re willing to self-host in your own home, using a mini PC or another method, you should do your homework and understand what you’re hosting. It can be really tempting to just keep up a bunch of random apps that you tried to self-host. It’s essential to periodically whittle down that list, and putting your stuff behind a VPN where possible is an important call. It’s one thing for a big PHP exploit to hit, but we live in an era when AI can discover security issues better than any human can.

Mini-Links

» Here’s a story that mini PC fans might find appealing someday: Apparently, it is possible to Hackintosh a Snapdragon PC.

» This probably isn’t totally surprising if you keep a close eye on old tech, but universities are excellent places to find good deals on low-cost computers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12FmVwZhEWY

» Need a mini PC with more than enough ports to work as your firewall? The Qotom Q51551UT, which sports four 10-gigabit Ethernet ports and six 2.5-gigabit ports, is likely to be more than enough for the average nerd. ServeTheHome has a pretty good review of a pretty weird mini-rig.

» Shots fired: Want a surface-level overview of the mini PC realm? Look no further than Wirecutter’s roundup, which starts with Apple and ends with Lenovo.

Jargon Clarifier

10GbE

In recent years, Ethernet speeds have continued to get faster, with speeds in certain specialized settings reaching 1.6 terabits, which is way faster than most demanding individual users are likely to ever need. But after years of one-gigabit connections, 10-gigabit Ethernet speeds are becoming increasingly common. The Mac Mini, for example, has offered the port as an upgrade option since 2018, and external Thunderbolt and USB-C adapters, while not cheap, are not uncommon.

You might be thinking to yourself, “but wait, my external internet connection tops out at one-gigabit speeds!” And you’d be right—the benefit of this port is likely not to get you the fastest possible internet speeds. Rather, the biggest benefit to a 10-gigabit connection is when you’re transferring a lot of files locally, for example when you’re sharing massive video files with your server, or in a local office. It’s a local networking boost, say if you’re sharing files between a file server or NAS.

(But if you’re wondering what it might be like to have a 10-gigabit internet connection, this blog post from Giles Thomas is enough to get you started.)

The problem for mini PC buyers, then, is that it’s often priced as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, and you’ll therefore be paying a premium for the right to connect to your machines in an extra-peppy way. (That often leads to posts suggesting it’s overrated.) But if you only need a super-speedy connection sometimes, consider using a fast USB or Thunderbolt connection between two devices, a concept called IP Over Thunderbolt. That’ll give you many of the same benefits without the added cost and port complexities.

Deal Watch

» The Mac Mini M6 is currently below $800 on Amazon … not cheap, but hey, it’s a start.

» Potential sign things are improving: The Acemagician W1, a Ryzen 7 255H machine, is near its one-year price low at Amazon. While the Firebat F1 we recently featured is still cheaper, the $529 Acemagician machine does come with more SSD space.

» While things aren’t cheap out there on the SSD front, I’ll point out that if you’re looking for something with SATA, Fanxiang is relatively inexpensive as far as SSDs go, and with a 15% coupon on eBay (SHOPNOW15), you can get a relatively large drive with slightly less wincing.

» NAS-curious? The Terramaster F2-212, which has room for two hard drives, is selling for less than $120 right now. You gotta supply the drives, though.

Mini PCs in History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-huzqryH-U

This is nearly two decades ago, but still recent enough that Zotac actually did a reveal on its YouTube channel.

The company whose first mini PC paired an Intel Atom chip and Nvidia graphics

If you were around in the late 2000s, you probably remember the all the excitement around netbooks, the small but usable computers that essentially put ASUS on the map. The Intel Atom-based chipsets on those could have potentially given mini PCs a bit of juice, but ultimately, they did not pop off in quite the same way the Eee PC did.

But at least one notable mini PC was able to leverage the energy around the netbook in desktop form, and it’s a company that’s still active today: Zotac. The company, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, first made an impression on reviewers with its “nettop” PC, the MAG ND01. While rocking just an Atom processor, it also came with Nvidia graphics, which helped it excel at gaming tasks of the era. (Turns out that the Nvidia Ion was a chipset made specifically for the netbook market. Fun! It’d probably add $500 to the cost of the machine in 2026.)

On HotHardware, reviewer Joel Hruska noted the machine was similar in size to the Nintendo Wii and, more amusingly, the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive (talk about a relic of its time). Comparing it to an Asus AT3GC-I which sported the same Atom 330 chip but not the Nvidia graphics, he pointed out that the systems were more or less night-and-day performance-wise.

His summary:

Zotac’s MAG HD-ND01 is a great little system. It matches or exceeds the performance of Intel’s Atom 330 / 945G platform in virtually every test and it’s capable of playing some games at framerates you might actually want to play them at. Desktop performance under Windows 7 was surprisingly quick, the bundled wireless had no problem transferring data through several walls even though it lacks an external antenna, and the 2GB of RAM proved adequate to the tasks at hand. If there’s a performance shortcoming, it’s the hard drive. The modest Toshiba drive feels sprightly enough when you’re doing very basic sorts of tasks, but anything that hits the south bridge or accesses the drive can lag significantly.

Design-wise, it was closer in vibe to the early-2000s legacy-free PCs, though sporting some ports that made it better for home-theater use cases, like optical audio, which I need to write about sometime.

In 2015, Zotac put up a page on its website noting that the ND01 was an important machine in the company’s history. “Ever since, we’ve been pushing the limit of small form factor computing providing users with more and more functionality and features,” the company wrote.

These days, Zotac makes both mini PCs, graphics cards, and server gear, an interesting mix of product lines. But its legacy is perhaps most pronounced in the mini PC space, where it sort of predicted the Steam Machine-style PC decades ago. Though I can’t imagine anyone would pair an Atom processor with an Nvidia graphics chip in 2026.

OK, that’s it for this edition of Boxed News. Doesn’t that Zotac machine make you miss the days when Nvidia focused on the low-end consumer market? Got any tips for us, anything we should be covering? Shoot me an email at ernie@tedium.co! Thanks!