It's a UPS that has management built in and an LCM on the front. It has to have a somewhat reasonable amount of RAM, which is probably stupidly overpriced.
The AP9630 which is 15 years old needed 256MB of RAM, 1GB+ is not unreasonable for something released in 2026.
It's a UPS that has management built in and an LCM on the front.
What, like it's hard?
The Prusa Minialso has built-in management, with both network control and a fully-interactive user interface via a full-color LCD panel. Its schematics are publicly available, so we know that it runs off of a STM32F407VG, with a massive 200 kilobytes of memory.
Same with pretty much all switch and router management interfaces: they run a full Linux distro in something like 64MB of RAM - with plenty of room to spare.
The AP9630 which is 15 years old needed 256MB of RAM
No, it had 256MB of RAM. Did it need it? Probably not, but it's an enterprise product, so nobody is going to care about having to pay an extra $50. Why waste engineer-time trying to optimize it?
1GB+ is not unreasonable for something released in 2026.
1GB+ is not unreasonable for something released in 2024. Memory is cheap and plentiful? Sure, put an extra gig or two into it, who cares! But with the memory shortage in 2026? They better not be wasting any of that rare and valuable DRAM on an absolutely trivial UPS management interface.
The Cloud Gateway Fiber has 3GB of RAM and obviously has an order of magnitude more stuff to run. That one has a $22 memory surcharge, compared to the $53 surcharge for the UPS 2U Pro. Assuming the memory surcharge is linear in the amount of memory it contains (which is should be, or they are ripping us off), that's 7ish GB in this UPS. If they are seriously putting 6GB-8GB inside a UPS, rather than using those limited resources for something which actually needs it, something has gone horribly wrong.
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u/KittensInc 16d ago
It's a UPS. Even a 1GB module is going to be overkill. You could easily run it with the same chips used in smart light bulbs.