Yeah. I have two Dreamplugs lying there unused at the moment, plus a CuBox used as NAS/TimeMachine, and a MicroPython waiting for some free time... so many options, so little time.
They are also getting so powerful, I'm seriously considering a few "enterprise" scenarios. Remember when IT meant mainframes, so individual departments would just bypass them and buy their own PCs? I think we're ready for a new wave of that decentralized approach: between mobile and these little bad boys, there's plenty of power around to run a number of applications that would have required a rack server 5 or 10 years ago. Now John Accountant could just buy a little silent box and put it on his desk, without having to go through hellish rounds of IT approvals.
Which would be nice, if we had the hardware of today with the IT practices of a time when enterprises might exert centralized control of departmental server purchases but not exert the same control over individual desktop system purchases and even the software installation on those desktops.
I never understood why he did that.
It was a good NUC and he needed a good NUC. If he had used it or even honed it, or took it out of his pocket and looked at it -- that's all he had to do.
My Dad had gone through a couple of those Shuttle "Mini" computers (the motherboards were Flex-ATX, slightly bigger than Mini-ITX and obviously needed to be smaller than micro-ATX), so I thought the NUC (between Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX [1]) might appeal to him. They both died and he's currently using a standard desktop. I believe one or both of his Shuttle's died due to a PSU failure, so it's nice to have the external power brick on the NUC.
He and my Mom had previously been using a Windows Media Center desktop with a tuner card and Comcast cable, but they're using DirecTV boxes on all the TVs now so not much need for a HTPC. He said he was thinking about trying to use the NUC with Windows 8 and a touch screen somehow...Not really sure how he can accomplish that. Besides introducing him to Linux, I was thinking he could use it on his TV as just an alternate computer and wanted to show him how to use Synergy to control it with his desktop keyboard/mouse. He's currently switching his TV between the DirecTV box and his desktop as a second display.
At the very least it's a backup, and he could potentially take it on trips as a more powerful alternative to a laptop. There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-in... (existence of Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX pointed out in the comments)