Over my holiday break I freed up a US-8-60W in my office, that I’m going to use to replace a larger under-utilized switch in my garage, to bring back to my office to free up the other US-8-60W, which I’ll probably take up to the cabin, trying to avoid feeding more money into the Ubiquiti beast as much as I can… So imagine my surprise to be reaching for my wallet this morning to order a brand-new product, a unicorn of an AP called the Swiss Army Knife Ultra1:
It’s an IPX6-rated, connectorized, upright, low-profile AP. Pole mount, wall mount, and possibly “desktop” mount — the marketing photos on the store show a desktop holder but nothing has been announced — so extremely versatile in terms of usage and placement. Launched on the US store yesterday for $109 but when I looked again this morning it was reduced by $20, making it ten bucks cheaper than the ancient-and-not-IP-rated UAP-AC-M, hereto their only connectorized WiFi AP of the AC era.
The Reddit spec nerds immediately complained that it’s WiFi-5, which is a somewhat puzzling choice given that this exact product with WiFi-6 would be incredibly disruptive and could command a much higher price, but I’m gonna assume that Ubiquiti knows what they’re doing here. I’d bet that the UAP-AC line is nearing the end of being viable to manufacture — those chipsets are from 2012! — and they needed something that could slot right in for the UAP-AC-M.
Personally, I’d been hesitating to add outdoor APs to the cabin because they’re all so unsightly, and I hadn’t wanted to deal with overhead mounting in the soffits or deck ceilings, where they’d still be unsightly if less overtly visible. I was giving serious thought to buying used upmarket APs, maybe Aruba IAP or Instant On, to get some less obnoxious wall-mount options.
So this product arrived at exactly the right moment with exactly the right features and I’m in for two to start.
- Who comes up with these names, anyways, and what are the odds they won’t change it ala the UXG-PRO going through several names in rapid succession? ↩︎