850 sats \ 2 replies \ @gnilma 30 May 2023 \ on: Umbrel is getting into hardware bitcoin
I would assume that they have a hardware production partner, like how Start9 partners with Purism to make their Pro machines. I wasn’t able to find that info on their site though… maybe Umbrel is actually doing it themselves?
And why do they not accept Bitcoin as payment for their machines? That is just a bad move…
They'll definitely have a white label deal with some ODM.
I'm more concerned with the fact that Umbrel's platform is already closed source and now they're just gonna make more closed source hardware. We have enough of that already.
Start9 working with Purism is good - they make every layer of the stack as open as it can be, e.g. custom open source EFI bootloaders.
With Umbrel's software not being FOSS I don't see any reason their hardware will be. Could even be from a super cheap supplier in China who preloads malware on it, there's plenty of those around on Alibaba.
As you said they haven't disclosed where the hardware is coming from so who knows?
reply
Which is exactly why I only keep an experimental amount of sats on my Umbrel running on Pi 4 and have much more sats sitting on my Embassy Pro.
Umbrel seems to be in the camp of move fast and break things. The sheer number of apps added to their app store in the past year seems to align with this ethos. I would be very cautious and would limit the amount of sats I put on an Umbrel if I use one as a Lightning node.
reply