They only targeted enthusiasts but there's incredible competition above and below.
Down market, there are way cheaper 1L business PCs which are mass produced for businesses but work great for consumers wanting small quiet (or not, 65w options also available) systems.
Up market, there's all manner of small form factor gaming PCs and others.
Intel did have a knack for having interesting twists & innovations, but they rarely were must have advantages. Building the whole PC on a card was an interesting & useful move, for their gaming Extreme series. Skull Canyon back in 2016 showed a power density and level of integration that the world didn't know had been possible. The price has always been high, too high for critical success, but I thanks Intel for pushing new things & pushing the market. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-...
I buy 2-4 year old Dell (or similar) micro desktops just for this reason. Just enough upgradability (SSD/RAM, sometimes even CPU) and just enough power but runs cool and quiet.
Recently bought a lot of 10 Dell Optiplex Micros for around $1,200 USD all ready to go (9th gen / 16GB DDR4 / 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro) for a small business that works on spreadsheets and basic data entry all day. Replaced old desktop towers and employees were happy to have more free desk/working space.
Every time I looked at getting a NUC when I wanted a SFF system I ran into this problem. If I just needed a low power Linux box I could get a cheapo Atom device or even just a Raspberry Pi. If I needed more power a SFF PC, a laptop, or even a Mac mini was usually an overall better buy accounting for my time invested.
They are only cheaper if you are buying the higher end units, and comparing them to the higher end NUC's like the Skull Canyon
If you get down into the Celeron Models and the price really can not be beat.
I have bought a TON of Celeron NUC's to run as Kioks, Signage, and other Single Application purposes, never found anything from Lenovo, Dell, etc that could beat the price
Down market, there are way cheaper 1L business PCs which are mass produced for businesses but work great for consumers wanting small quiet (or not, 65w options also available) systems.
Up market, there's all manner of small form factor gaming PCs and others.
Intel did have a knack for having interesting twists & innovations, but they rarely were must have advantages. Building the whole PC on a card was an interesting & useful move, for their gaming Extreme series. Skull Canyon back in 2016 showed a power density and level of integration that the world didn't know had been possible. The price has always been high, too high for critical success, but I thanks Intel for pushing new things & pushing the market. https://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-...