I know from working with another similar-sized company's product, the manufacturing logistics at the China electronics job-shops have been all sorts of messed up since COVID hit there before us. They were three months delayed in getting their first batch out of the factory, and then have to factor in the Amazon backlog because they didn't accept incoming warehouse shipments for a month or so to focus on shipping emergency supplies.
Whether the incoming is more C-5 or the new C-7 is the $64,000 question.....
Many years ago I was an audio equipment salesman on the side. Back then audio was my hobby.
There was a gentlemen who would come in every few months and talk about what is coming out and that he might wait for it. As with any retail product, there is always something "coming out".
In the 5+ years I was there, he never purchased anything. I think the saying here could be....."Tomorrow Never Comes"
Well, they could do what another hub vendor did .. produce a cost-reduced version with less performance and fewer features, and implicitly encourage people to upgrade to it.
People were shocked when I mentioned that on the Reddit Wink forum.
"V3 HAS to be better than V2, it has a higher number."
Nope, dumbed down, less memory, and cheaper. Less than 5 minutes in your favorite search engine brings up the comparison between them. Few bothered to look.
It is still worth noting that, similar to Hubitat, ST's engineers have stated that v2's local resources were vastly underutilized. Of course, since they're doing a lot less than Hubitat's local resources are, that may or may not remain true as they (supposedly...) move towards local processing. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
I couldn't help but notice when I checked Amazon.com a moment ago that the C-5 hub is expected back in stock on June 7th with an order now option. I guess this answers some of my questions
That being the case, I'm not prepared to wait for the unknown potential release of the C-7 down the road. The more videos I watch and threads I read, the more excited I am about getting my hands on this. I really need to get away from SmartThings (although it has had its place).
I've probably got $3000 invested in smart home devices by now. If it turns out that the thing that ties it all together that I paid $99 for becomes functionally down-level in just 2-3 years, I really won't be all that sad.
