Raspberry Pi Forums

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12 ... _mini_pcs/

Note the last paragraph...I think these things are a swing and a miss.

What I find significant ...

One market Gurgen did not mention is hobbyists, a significant omission given early reports of the NUC range portrayed it as a Raspberry Pi-eater. Given the cost of the units, the need for extra components and the fact Intel offers very few downloads for operating systems other than Windows, the NUCs seem destined not to have mass appeal in the Pi's slice of the market.

There's no mention of what a Pi is.
It's just assumed everyone knows what it is, it has its own market sector, and is the leader in that sector.
The Pi has come of age.

As a willful teenager....

It's almost like someone looked at the specs for the Pi and designed something to only have whatever the Pi doesn't ... starting with a high price tag and continuing through an advertising display systems integrator target customer base (not consumers, much less students or hobbyists), requiring additional components to actually be able to do anything useful, overly expensive interfaces to even more expensive peripherals (Thunderbolt), much higher power consumption (Core i7 - not exactly a watt miser), more than twice the board area, PCIe or dual display interfaces, and who-knows-what-else. The NUC is much more like a Mac Mini than anything else - a small form-factor version of a higher-end desktop system.

Intel has never been interested in markets with no margins - that's why the only systems that have been compared to the Pi are from Chinese low-margin, commodity system manufacturers. You can't get much lower-margin than developing a system via volunteers, commodity manufacturing, Internet promotion and sales, and volume direct distribution.

It is unlikely that Intel will ever be even mildly interested in competing with a Raspi as the profit margin is way to low.