As long as the antennas are kept vertical, upside down or right side up doesn't matter.
So, the antennas can rotate 360 degrees?
Yes
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But this would still get you somewhat down the POE path if you wanted that as a power source w/ Ethernet separate no?
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Yes poe adapters work fine, im using 5 or 6 of them.
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Side question. Do you think the Lutron hub would benefit having an external antenna on it?
I've never had connectivity issues between the Lutron Hub and any related devices.
That seems like a solution looking for a problem.
I’d definitely go for it!
Ok, ordered one. Why? Well, it has external antenna and ZigBee 3.0, so it's better of course.
I don't really know if Matter support will ever matter to me. I'm thinking I'll probably be on Hubitat C-9 or C-10 by the time that happens, but the C-8 will support it if I'm wrong (or if I feel like playing around with it some day).
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Didn’t see anyone answer your question specifically. Same ram, same cpu. In discussions the thinking shared was that ram and cpu aren’t limitations for the vast majority of users since it’s really an IO intensive device and that’s where the improvements have been made. That being said there have been some improvements in both memory management and cpu load management but it is my understanding that those are platform changes that should yield benefit on the C7 as well. Pretty sure they are included in the most recent production release.
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I believe this is a reference to the bandwidth capability of the older Z-Wave devices. As you mentioned, it will not change for old devices.
And this appears to be a reference to latency improvements, which having fewer hops will definitely improve.
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From the end user's perspective, the potential decrease in latency would increase "snapiness", so @bcopeland's interpretation of speed is closer to what @blulegend intended.
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Agreed. The term “speed” is where the confusion arises, as it it a little ambiguous when describing a network. Often, low latency is far more desirable than high bandwidth. Personally, I’ll take both high bandwidth and low latency! 
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So no wall mounts with the stock antennas then. they can only be oriented horizontally if the hub is mounted flat against a wall.
EDIT: Per @ogiewon and @thebearmay's correction belows (and my slowly cogitating brain) you can of course mount the hub "sideways" and point the two antennas vertically up and down. But if you're the type of person who mounts the hub sideways, I'm not sure we're going to get along.... 
It is always nice to have spare full motion antennas around just for fun.
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I bought the C8 for the same reason as I'm part of the beta, and upgrade the firmware every single time they release an update.
It's been a while since Z-Wave mis-behaved, or my Hue hubs were not responding quickly etc. I don't know if I have a range problem.
It will be an interesting experiment to allow the C8 to manage some of my Zigbee devices rather than relying on an external hub. I have a wi-fi hub that might also become redundant.
Only time will tell if I'm flying too close to the sun, but the Hubitat development staff seem a cautious bunch.
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Just mount the hub with the Hubitat logo facing in the readable position, then adjust one antenna UP and the other one DOWN. Voila! Both antennas are still verticle!
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Mount the hub sideways!? Heresy!! 
Yeah I was holding up the hub looking at a little while ago in realized that. Was coming back here to correct my post but you beat me to it!
In the end because of how my wires are running etc I'm going to mount mine on the side of a bookcase with the antennas on the bottom pointing downwards.
Unfortunately where I mount this hub is very visible to my wife. So the new hub cat will be completely out of the bag soon. 
The hub arriving tonight is just perfect timing. She's gone all day tomorrow at the office while I am futzing around with the transition.
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I will say that I finally got my Zen25's to play nicely with my C7. I to say it was a few platform updates ago (maybe 3-4 months ago) when everything finally changed.
To the Original post. I was about to order a C7 and have the external antenna mod done. When rumor of the C8 broke, I decided to just wait it out and see what happens. It is cheaper to by the C8 than to buy a new C7 and have the mods done, plus it appears switching devices from a C7 to C8 should be pretty easy and not require pairing each device with the C8, the hub warranty makes a lot more sense than it did with the C7.
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I'm in it for the range as well, but ironically, I will be moving from 2 hubs to 3, with the old C7 devices hub being repurposed to handle cloud integrated devices.
Yes, thanks for the link @rlithgow1. That solves the stick issue.
The first line in that item's description is: " * READ BEFORE YOU BUY: The Z-Wave stick is for advanced users only, NOT for beginners. You must be comfortable with programming and have expert computer and Z-Wave knowledge to use this device."
I am a home automation user, NOT an expert programmer, nor with expert knowledge of Zwave. "Expert Zwave and computer programmers only!" was never a marketing slogan I spotted in Hubitat's materials. As an end-user, not IoT developer, I expect to be able to click a "Delete" button and actually have that device deleted. Is this really so much to ask?
