If you are curious whether Ubiquiti ditched the fan on the new U7 Pro Max, well, I have some bad news for you. I opened the device and this is the teardown video.
Are Ubiquiti devices still the best value for homelabs and small businesses these days?
For home, second hand Ubiquity might be. You can get flying saucers taken off from corpo upgrades for dirt cheap.
I bought several before knowing what I was getting into. They work well but are designed by people worshiping Apple. Everything is locked into their ecosystem. You can’t even ssl into the access point to configure it. You need to run their Java controller app to configure them or worse buy another product (cloud key) just to configure the access points you purchased. Then they try really hard to get you to setup your network admin password on their cloud servers ( they have already had security breaches where the passwords leaked).
For a small businesses that pay someone off-site to manage their network they seem fantastic. But they are the opposite of homelab ethos.
But again, they work really well. The access points do channel strength negotiation automatically every night by talking to each other.
I was able to SSH into mine and I’m running their Docker container with a Unifi Controller instead of a cloud key.
You don’t even need the controller to set them up anymore. You can run them as standalone APs by configuring with the app.
You miss out on a lot of features that way, but they work fine. I
I can ssh into the APs, although I’m not sure about configuring them independent of a controller as I haven’t tried. I use a free google cloud tier to host the controller, which can be managed via web gui and phone app. It may use some Java elements in the controller but it wasn’t hard to set up.
You can configure them independently of a controller by ssh but the config will be lost on a reboot or when the device next polls the controller
Edit: and apparently someone else has said you can use the app to configure them without a controller at all
