It’s cool. And I do not pretend to know all of that since I only see Roon from the outside. But I’ve been in a lot of businesses from psychical products to marketing and now mostly e-commerce (where I also talk a lot to merchants and know a lot o bout their businesses).
And in a technical perspective Nucleus is still very much a NUC so I’m guessing from there.
At what price point? I honestly don’t think there is a workable number that would be near what you’d want to see. Maybe @agillis at Small Green Computer would like to weigh in. SGC’s current least expensive offering is $795. Would that do it for the demo you want to reach?
Cloud based Roon Core was our thinking as well, but we haven’t been able to figure out how to do this cost effectively. There is a reason why no one does this well for “local storage”. It’s easy for full-cloud streaming since everyone is basically looking at the same data – the user editable metadata and local storage make it so everyone has their own personal streaming service.
I’m not 100% convinced Nucleus Mini would sell.
I think @orgel is on the money, most of my friends just couldn’t give a damn about music listening quality. Even those with big home cinema rig don’t really use it for music.
My 30+ year old son often listens on his phone speaker, which drives me insane, despite being around good sound for most of his life.
My 30-something daughter’s the same — Spotify on the iPhone — and she’s been around music her whole life.
It’s a free or cheap commodity now and you don’t value…
A current generation NUC8 i3 (cost around €300 where I live) with a price around €800-€900 or less would be a killer. The Nucleus i3 is €1800 over here. Or a going for a cheaper chipset altogether with the focus on very small “physical” libraries.
But if the current model works I guess the majority of people buying the likes of B&W, KEF, Bang & Olufsen and the likes isn’t necessarily an interesting target group for now.
I’m not really criticising the niche just think the product is greater than its current space.
This was just my 5 cents (that happened to become like x10 
)
Please get on that right away, so we can resolve this issue (and so I can have Roon in my car).
I’m with @danny on this (doh). I don’t think Roon could sell enough of those to make it worthwhile. Still too expensive for the crowd you’re talking about to get out their digital wallets.
Remember, Sonos is “really expensive” to most in that space.
Not according to the crowd I have been talking to (and about). But sure there is always some discrepancy between what people say and what people do.
Probably how they argue, yes. But going break-even for a “nucleus mini” and then adding the subscription fees could potentially still work as a business case.
But I’ll let Roon ideate and iterate on their own 
I’ve already said too much 
tell me more…
This is not ”the majority” either. But the people I have talked, sometimes extensively, with about sound or hifi that really enjoys good quality but wouldn’t fit in the classic “hifi niche”. Very much into streaming, not nerdy enough to go Vinyl or even consider it.
To simplify these are the people with a salary big enough to think Sonos is on the low end of the scale but they are not nerdy enough to spend a months salary worth on new gear. They have things such as KEF LS50, mid tier Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen Beolab 18, Beosound 2, Beoplay A9 … One placed an order for the new Devialet aiming to put them when it’s possible. I’m talking about that crowd. I have convinced all of them to go lossless but I’m not getting further than that 
We are finding more and more of those users as Roon members, but most are using computers or ROCK as their Core.
It’s still unclear to me they would buy a ~$900 Roon Core (which exist already). They would jump on a Cloud Roon Core, and they might buy into a ~$200 Roon Core as an “adapter” type product.
Does a $900 core exist from Roon?
And I think that €500 is very much in the space for these people since the Bluesound Node 2i is considered “good value”. Also being 30+ this group spend a considerable high percentage amount on things for their home in general.
I would assume this has been tossed around at Roon, but you don’t necessarily have to make a profit on a nucleus type device. You’ll make money by the subscriptions you enable.
The NUC costs €300 but you need add SSD + RAM. The NUC has a small fan (not great) so then you need to buy a fanless case.
The sonicTransporter i5 is much faster then an i3 and it’s in a fanless (milled from a single block of aluminium) case and it has 8GB of RAM for €695.
I guess we could make a cheaper i3 version with 4GB RAM but I like the i5 because it makes the Roon interface really fast and it has some extra CPU for future expansion and it’s well under you €800-€900 price point
when I asked in December a Cirrus7 with 8th gen i7 processor, 32GB Ram and 128GB SSD was about €950
Resuming about my experience from post 8, above, I have the BIOS on my NUC8i5BEH set to “Quiet”, and the fan does not come on when idle, nor when ‘only’ serving a remote end point on my network. But, the fan spins up to a low speed when I have it output anything, directly, via it’s USB or HDMI ports. I mean anything, even just 16-bit 44KHz stereo on USB. It will often cycle between short times on and off. So it is thermally marginal for silent operation, out-of-the-box. The unit is on a wide-open, hard surface, in a 20C ambient. Since I have the NUC right by my primary listening devices, this is a small annoyance.
I have checked back with Akasa, and they are progressing on their fanless case(s) for NUC8s. I might become an early adopter… 
Hi
I am completely new to Roon and NUCs. Over past few days I’ve watched a few of Han Beekhuyzen’s videos and read a few posts on here - thanks for those.
Naively, I ordered 8th gen i5 slim NUC thinking the newest model would be best. Spent yesterday evening installing memory, SSD, BIOS and Rock.
My only issue was that I foolishly pressed the F10 too soon and couldn’t get into boot menu until I realised my mistake.
Everything is working great. Only downside is I probably wasted a bit of cash on an over specified system