30 PCWorld JANUARY 2021NEWS INTEL’S NUC M15 LAPTOP
Intel’s 11th-gen sings
the loudest when it’s
given a little more
power to consume
and a little more room
to get hot.
Of course, what
Intel wants to show
off doesn’t always
align with what
laptop makers want
to sell. Performance
isn’t always the end
goal, either, as
manufacturers
balance engineering,
time, budget, and
what marketers
believe their customers want to pay for.
For instance, with the Whitebook program
and the NUC M15, Intel can implement
features such as its nifty presence detection
technology, which lets your laptop wake up
when you come near it. That’s a feature a PC
maker might skip, however, because it would
mean throwing more resources at a feature its
customers may not want.
With Intel promising a ton of new features
when it rolls out its Xe Max GPU (go.pcworld.
com/xmax)—-which can work very closely
with Intel’s CPUs—we’d guess the NUC M 15
is a way for Intel to get those features out and
in consumers’ hands rather than wait for
OEMs to do it.AN INTEL WARRANTY
While Intel, XPG, and a host of other
partners declined to confirm that the XPG
was a 95-percent-Intel laptop, that shyness
seems to be gone with the NUC 15, which
might be a good thing. A consumer
looking at putting down $1,500 for a
notebook from a small PC shop might be
worried about just how good the warranty
is from a company that isn’t one of the big
names. The NUC M15 will be backed up
by a two-year warranty from the biggest
name in PCs: Intel. We’d guess much of
the support for drivers and BIOS/UEFI
updates will also flow from Intel, another
good thing.The NUC Compute Elements laptop concept from 2019 would have made
the laptop modular.