Thanks to a great, black friday, special. For those who could be interested, there are still some on sale right here. Snatch 'em before the price goes up without warning 
!
You can for $400 (just add an Akasa Plato x8). That’s a bit over a third of what you paid. As I pointed out earlier, our definitions of “a little bit” seem to differ (and that’s fine, there are only good choices here).
Building a NUC is a good option, but not 1/4 the price of a Nucleus, especially if you add a fanless case. I did the arithmetic and decided to go Nucleus.
You’re right: I’d done the fanless case math from your $280 number.
For the curious, here’s the arithmetic:
1199 / 356.94 = 3.36 (the current price vs an Amazon cart with the Akasa fanless case)
1199 / 481.01 = 2,5 (the current price vs an Amazon cart with the Akasa fanless case)
1398 / 356.94 = 3,9 (MSRP without the fanless case)
1398 / 481.01 = 2,9 (MSRP with a fanless case)
All of these are fantastic options. And it’s great that people consider $718-$1041 to just be “a little bit” of money.
Evidently, lots of people consider the difference, money well spent. Otherwise, we would all build a NUC.
Check out the new Intel “Rugged Elements” fanless case.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/zip/nuc/nuc-elements/
Sexy… Couldn’t find an MSRP for 'em though (and wonder if they’ll be officially supported as a platform).
Those cases are for use with the new Elements Compute family of products, i.e. not the current NUC motherboards. Currently, they are meant for integrators, I am not sure they are going to be consumer facing for a long time.
And I don’t think they’re quite released yet, though there are stories about them.