If gaming laptops are just too bulky for you and you're desperate to burn an enormous hole in your wallet, the new Asus ROG NUC is surely a vision of your dreams

When Asus took over Intel's baton for the Next Unit of Computing (aka the NUC or mini PC), some of us hoped that we'd be treated to a fresh new direction to the original concept. Essentially, that's what we got, but it also came with something we didn't want, and the latest Asus ROG NUC perhaps embodies everything that has gone wrong with the whole platform.

Ostensibly, there's not a great deal of difference between the freshly announced ROG NUC 16 and last year's ROG NUC. They both sport Intel Arrow Lake HX processors (albeit the Plus models in the 16) and a GeForce RTX 50-series mobile GPU; you can fit up to 128 GB of memory (up from 96 GB) and two M.2 SSDs in both of them, as well.

The looks have been spruced up, with the ROG NUC 16 being a tad flashier in appearance than the older design. It's not a radical change, and if I'm permitted to be honest, the white model (so...