Sadly Apple can build low power small systems with 2x, 4x, and 8x the memory bandwidth, but nobody else seems interested.
They didn't? Admittedly I don't know that much about it, but the Wikipedia page is very thorough. I don't remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either; it became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it, and the ISA bus was open. I don't see what's stopping anyone else from copying Intel's NUC form factor.
The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn't a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don't care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that. According to the Wikipedia article, Gigabyte made their own version of NUC that was similar but not the same, so of course parts aren't going to be compatible; when companies are doing this instead of just copying a single big competitor, then there's no de-facto standard, just a bunch of competing and incompatible standards.
Correct, they did not. They did with ATX and BTX (but BTX was dropped before it caught on broadly, in a focus shift.)
> I don’t remember IBM making the PC-AT a standard either
Yeah, but you are the one who brought IBM up, so what?
> It became a de-facto standard because everyone just copied it,
Yeah, its not the 1980s, and there isn’t one manufacturer that is both as dominant as IBM and as unconcerned with protecting itself from cloning as as IBM was until the PS/2.
> The difference between the 80s/90s and now is that there isn’t a single 800lb gorilla for everyone to copy, and for some reason other companies just don’t care to take the stuff Intel has done and copy that.
There wasn’t an 800lb gorilla to copy in the 1990s, either, because IBM went proprietary with the PS/2. The =difference between the 1990s/2000s and today is that Intel (or someone else similarly situated; Nvidia could plausibly do it) isn’t actively promoting form factor standards, the way it did with ATX (from 1995) and BTX (from 2004, but stopped being actively promoted in a few years because Intel temporarily shifted business focus to low power designs, and BTX was centered around improved airflow for high power applications.)
That's the problem: the ATX standard. It's almost 30 years old at this point. It was never designed for modern GPUs or good thermal performance, it was just a step up from the creaky old IBM PC-AT standard that came before. The only way to get a desktop PC designed for good airflow and proper thermal management is to abandon the ATX standard and do something custom and proprietary, like the small-form-factor or workstation corporate desktops from Dell. But that means you need to buy the entire system at once (just like buying a laptop), and not put it together from parts like in the 1990s. And it's impossible to have a new open standard because no huge players are stepping up to make such a standard and then force everyone else to use it, and it's impossible for the industry as a whole to sit down and make a standard together that doesn't suck.