The wider PC industry isn't doing so well, and last week's news that Sony would be selling off its VAIO business is just the latest indication of that fact. That doesn't mean things are all bad—there's still some growth to be found, and one area where it's happening is in mini-desktops like Intel's NUC or Asus' upcoming Chromebox. Intel tells us that sales of truly tiny PCs (things near the size of the NUC, Gigabyte's Brix Pro, or Lenovo's M93p Tiny) have gone from "almost zero in 2012" to over a million units in 2013.

And yet these mini-desktops don't always make sense. If you want something compact for your desk that saves you cable clutter, an all-in-one will frequently be a better option. If you want something more powerful, a more traditional micro ATX or even mini ITX PC can be purchased or built for less money, often with a greater amount of CPU and GPU power. We spoke with Lisa Graff, vice president of Intel's PC Client Group, to get a better idea of how these desktops are doing and who exactly is buying them.

Business-friendly features in a tiny package

Graff came in from the data center group last year to run Intel's desktop business. "When I came in there were a number of areas in desktop that were growing, kind of bucking the trend of some of what we're seeing in the PC business," Graff told Ars. "And as we started to drill in, this was one of the areas—all-in-ones were clearly a growth area—but this mini-desktop, really, the growth has been incredibly strong."

NUCs and similar systems are attracting interest from people who want to use them as Steam Machine-style mini game consoles, an area Graff identified as a "greenfield" for Intel. The company didn't have much of a foothold in that market before, so any growth there is enlarging Intel's footprint. Consumers are also buying them for use as home theater PCs, a task they're well suited to because of their low power consumption and small size.

The strongest demand for tiny desktops has come from businesses, though, and it's here where mini-desktops have advantages over all-in-one PCs (which, Graff noted, do tend to sell better to consumers rather than businesses).

"One of the challenges to all-in-one growth is that an all-in-one by definition is refreshing the monitor and the computer at the same time," she said. "And a lot of times, that's not the refresh rate you see. Companies will refresh the PC itself more often than the monitor." Desktops (even mini-desktops like the NUC) also tend to be easier to open and repair than most all-in-ones. To that end, some of Intel's customers have apparently opted to stick NUCs and other small PCs to the back of monitors with VESA mounts, creating something with an all-in-one-esque footprint that's a little easier to take apart and service.

"We literally have end customers ordering through one of our OEMs, 20,000, 40,000, 60,000 units at a time going in to refresh some of their desktops," Graff told Ars. "They're putting them in manufacturing. They're actually just going places where the size makes a pretty big difference." While the NUC itself doesn't offer enterprise-class management features like Intel's vPro, OEM systems like Lenovo's M93p Tiny can fill that gap. Businesses are also using some of the cheaper, lower-end NUC models as thin clients, another area where Intel doesn't have much of a foothold. Update: While no Haswell models of the NUC currently offer vPro, some Ivy Bridge models like the DC53427HYE and D53427RKE do support the feature.

"That market was five million units or so in 2013, so that's just a growth opportunity we haven't participated in too much," Graff said.

The evolution of the desktop

While the desktop was long ago surpassed by the laptop (and then the smartphone, and then the tablet) in popularity, and many of the desktops you can buy today don't look that much different from the ones you could get 10 years ago, the rise of small-but-powerful mini-desktops has been facilitated by Intel's focus on low-power chips for laptops and tablets. The Haswell NUC uses the exact same CPU you can buy in Apple's MacBook Air or any number of other Ultrabooks, but two or three years ago, the best mini-desktops you could buy were things like the Asus Eee Box . Those mini desktops had more in common with poky and frustrating netbooks than with high-end ultraportable laptops.

CPU architectures like Haswell have been developed with laptops and tablets in mind—the architecture's greatest improvements come in the form of battery life and power consumption, but its peak performance isn't radically different from the preceding Ivy Bridge architecture. Even in the absence of a big performance increase, Graff told us that Intel's low-power desktop CPUs (those at around 35W or 65W TDPs) are still proving to be popular.

"We've actually seen 50 percent growth in 2013 over 2012 in our lower-power desktop processors," she said.

We couldn't get exact sales figures from Intel regarding the NUC specifically, but the number and variety of versions available is indicative of at least some level of success. The standard Haswell NUC has recently been joined by a version with an integrated 2.5-inch drive bay and a cheaper, slower model with Intel's Bay Trail Celeron CPU.

"The whole category is growing. A million units last year; I think we're going to see something like 50 percent growth this year. We'll see what it is, but it's going to be strong, positive growth... NUCs are growing, our OEMs' businesses are growing."

Even if mini-desktop sales grow to 1.5 million units in 2014, that's still just a tiny piece of the market. Gartner's latest numbers suggest that about 268.5 million desktops and laptops were sold in 2013, down about 41 million units from 2012 (Gartner breaks out tablets, convertibles, and smartphones from these numbers, but it makes no distinction between desktop computers and traditional laptops). As the primary provider of chips for the PC market, Intel has been hurt by this decline—its revenues were down about one percent from 2012, and its profits were down 13 percent. By growing at all, mini-PCs are bucking industry trends, and getting into new markets will be a good thing for Intel's bottom line. It's just not likely that these diminutive desktops can make up for the slumping sales of their larger counterparts.