It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.
Reviews are wildly polarised.
* Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions]
* While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
Wake me up when wayland just works for basic things I need and use daily, and I don't have to hear some diatribe about why what I do daily is wrong.
(What I do may be "wrong" in some cosmic technological sense, but it's still "the only thing supported by the software vendor" and also "isn't actually broken" in the sense of "works just fine". Unlike wayland, which "doesn't work just fine")
When I talked to them four years ago, they agreed we were good to use it for free, no problem.
The dollar figure they're asking for would make it the single most expensive software product we would be licensing in our enterprise, by a lot. The deadline is absurdly soon for such a big deal. And they opened discussion in an incredibly hostile manner and have made no attempt to work with us.
So, I'm helping lead the effort to completely purge them from our ecosystem. On the one hand, I'm sad because their stuff is pretty good. On the other hand, their behavior is bad and the product isn't better by the amount they're asking for.
The job market is hell to apply in. Job seekers are incentivised to come up with strategies and techniques to make mass application simpler, and sure enough, they have. Go team humanity.
Are there in person communities for this sort of thing? I've set myself a personal project to reproduce some circuits I have in a 1947 paper. But I'm not a hardware guy, huge tracts of the tooling are opaque, best practices are unclear, etc etc etc.
So I'm looking to just come meet people in person who know the material and can provide advice. Do such groups exist? Especially in Los Angeles?
It's easy to imagine that the same person who's willing to ignore explicit instructions and clearly put others at risk, is going to be willing to spend extra time struggling to open a locked container.
This isn't going to be a "gave it a tug, didn't open, give up and move on" situation.
I have a USG Pro 4. Which is still purchasable from their website, not yet EOL, nominally still supported. The only firmware update in the last two years was to fix a security issue, and didn't include support for updated VPNs.
From my perspective, they have failed catastrophically to do what I perceive as the pivotally important parts of their job, without which the rest of it is pointless. So, while you say "Just stop", I say "Why the hell should this company be trusted with anything network-related, if they can't do bare-minimum-required security stuff?"
The hilarity that goes with this is that their VPN has been broken for years - android and iPhone both deprecated protocols that were considered insecure, but ubiquiti hasn't seen fit to add any others. It has been years.
Their security posture is trash, which is unfortunate for a company that plays a central role in security
But then you lose many of the benefits of a single pane of glass.
There's also the trust issue; the VPN problem has been known for years. If they won't maintain a key security component of their key security device, why would I trust them with anything?
I bought into their unifi ecosystem years ago. Separate devices, prosumer pricing, features and quality, single pane of glass.
... And I haven't upgraded anything since. Their new products are totally undirected, they aren't making items that are obvious and needed. Their software is falling behind and they just don't care.
Case in point: the usg pro 4 is years old but they havent released an updated affordable just-the-border device. Their new stuff like the dream machine, and now this, just isn't the right thing to replace what was there before. The VPN on there doesn't work with recent Android or iPhone, and they just don't care.
Adding even the most basic firewall rules is hard. The single pane of glass got a major interface overhaul, and they added a huge amount of hard-to-turn-off phone-home crap at the same time. Enshittification reigns supreme.
And don't forget other runty hardware like the poe ceiling lights and doorbell.
The company just needs to buckle down, make good stuff, fire the product astronauts, fix obvious major problems before adding pointless new features.
... Suffice to say, my next hardware refresh almost certainly won't be from this company.
Or even worse, premiums went up because you could have inherited costly diseases (but didn't), and they have no way to verify it unless you also prostrate yourself on the altar of no privacy.