alt Hacker News>mini PCs became cheaper
or maybe the mini pcs started becoming available at all. I think these were a concept since core 2 duo and first gen i3 era. before then the chips were too much wattage for a mini pc. and the first generation mini pcs were also costly for enterprises to adopt in bulk. its only after 4th and 6th gen intel that these were adopted in large quantities in enterprises and once they dumped those in the used market they became comparable in pricing and somewhat in power to a rpi.
Used powerful PCs have always been available for dirt cheap on eBay even when the first pi was launched. just that mini pcs are a more recent thing.
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Well, the earlier Mini-PCs were a good bit more anemic, that's why adoption was slow; I had one or two earlier ones; both were AMD Bobcat cores; one was a 'not quite finished' thing where I took a dreamcast and put a small board in it (Where did that go, anyway?) and the other was a small, almost router-sized box. And both of those were, well... good for most of what I wanted (i.e. 8/16 bit console emulation and basic media/browsing) but definitely constrained. (As a side rant, I still wish AMD didn't kneecap non-console Jaguar parts, that single channel limit always struck me as a 'we don't want to show how much we fucked up with bulldozer' sort of thing...)
As far as mini-pcs... The first Intel NUC was a Sandy bridge, i.e. Gen2, FWIW. And we did have the 'Mac Mini' as far back as 2005, buuuuut that wasn't cheap because Apple.
I think SSDs were another big part of mini-PCs though; it's easy to forget for granted the risks of having a hard drive in a poor thermal environment, as well as the general size constraints one imposes. [0]
[0] - Surrrre, you could use a 2.5 inch HDD instead, but 2.5 inch HDDs almost always were slower than a 3.5 inch HDD (excluding the VelociRaptor, but that would only be more demanding as far as thermal...)
i worked with Intel NUCs in 2013-2014, not exactly recent and they were good enough then.