It's probably time to reevaluate that opinion. Apollo Lake/Gemini Lake are extremely competent little chips. The latest uarch puts them around a Core2Quad performance, perfectly acceptable for light desktop usage scenario.

I've been using one all summer for web browsing/citrix/etc so I don't have to run my big gaming rig in the summer heat, and it's been great. There's a seller on Amazon who has been clearing out the NUC7PJYH (J5005 based) off and on for the last year or so for $125 and I've picked up a couple. Despite the official spec they do support 16GB of memory and they also have the new media block with HDMI 2.0b support and HEVC 10-bit decode, they are super great for the price.