But just the monitor is too big. If you get a small monitor then it's worse than a laptop.
I don't recall mentioning my monitor, but it's an 8 month old 32 inch Samsung 4K monitor. I have an older 32 inch 4K monitor but it's developing some banding -- still works and forms my backup.
Well you want a small PC so that you can take with you in the car but where do you keep the 32" monitors? In the car too?
In 2018 I was working for a company in San Mateo, California and working remotely while I waited 15 months for my H-1B visa. I was visiting California about every 3 months for a couple of weeks. The rest of the time I was living in Moscow, then Paihia NZ, then Emerald QLD, then Paihia again, then Nadi Fiji, then NZ again.
I did my work on a NUC with an i7-8650U CPU and 32 GB RAM. It literally could fit in my jeans front pocket.
In each place that I worked I had a 32" 4K monitor.
You could say I should have a laptop instead. But they cost far more than a NUC, I hate working on laptop screens, and for sure am not going to work on a plane.
Also, something I was doing multiple times a day was compiling the entire RISC-V GNU toolchain (because I was experimentally adding new instructions to the ISA): binutils, gdb, gcc, libc. On the NUC it took 20 minutes. On a laptop with the exact same i7-8650U CPU (ThinkPad X1 Carbon) it took 30+ minutes due to thermal throttling.