Really I have just been thinking about the future. I love tech, I love building tech, I love using tech, I really enjoy pushing tech to the limits of what it can do and reaping the rewards that it brings.
Right now the new switches and hardware have ‘etherlighting’, it’s basically RGB lighting for network hardware. It looks cool, but when looking across the spectrum (pun) of Unifi products, I wonder if it is a flash in the pan for the current generation, or whether it will withstand the test of time and make it into later generations of products.
I enjoy being on the bleeding edge of tech. However, I also do not enjoy wasting money. I will happily upgrade something after 3-5 years of usage, but I dont want to throw the towel in with my current setup just because the newer gear has pulsing blinky lights… oh baby, they pulse as well as blink…. AHEM.
I also think that what a pro-sumer actually wants, Unifi is completely aware of. Hmmm, lets just say I could get a UDM Pro, with six SFP+ ports for 10GB, PoE++ to power devices, and at least one HDD tray for Protect, it would essentially cut off and make redundant 70% of the devices that consumers/prosumers would want to purchase. Because you have one box that does everything.
There are downsides to this – if that one box of tricks fails, then you are shit outta luck with your network stack. I appreciate having layers of redundancy, or probably more likely, multiple items I can use to make sure that my network stays up in the event of failure. Wait, that’s the same thing. Whatever. At the end of the day I look forward to what is coming, again 5 years down the line I can see most of my stack having been upgraded to something that has released within that window. But not being a guy who immerses themselves in RGB, I am going to give the etherlighting gear a miss (unless Ubiquiti want to send me some! PLEASE SEND ME SOME TO PLAY WITH). The power and performance I need for my day to day is right here in my hands and I am loving the ease of use and total controlability that these hardware items bring.