It ships with an external power supply, but it is not an LPS. You are free to replace it if you want to, including replacing with a future Roon Labs upgrade-power-supply that will also match the industrial design of the Nucleus’ case. That power supply is in development right now, but we are not ready to share details until it is ready to ship.
yes
The hardware is fanless, unlike the NUC. If you want to understand the pricing, @JWC wrote a great post on this. There are posts in this thread as well from my self and @brian – but @JWC’s post is really spot-on: