Oh, that's awesome, thanks for making it! I'll take a look.

I'm sure they have done plenty of market research, and that research probably indicates that enthusiasts who buy server racks are a much smaller market than large enterprise users that need easily scalable on-prem resources.

Lots of people saying "I would love this" is not a profitable market. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in that phrase. Would you buy the lowest level rack for $100k, paying extra for any support? (I don't have any insight into actual pricing, but I know enterprise consumers don't bat an eyelid at prices like that.)

If not then maybe the "I would love this" is not relevant for a real market.

(I think you meant "like hotcakes", not "like cupcakes"?)

In any event: from the beginning, we have always been targeted at the enterprise buyer who is looking at annual public cloud bills in the tens, hundreds or (in some cases) thousands of millions of dollars per year. We love the enthusiasm that Oxide engenders among the home lab set, but that's not how we have geared the business (for lots of good reasons).

Also, for whatever it's worth: people do want to buy them, it turns out.

This comment is a great example of completely misunderstanding… everything?

Just because a few people on a niche tech site are excited by niche tech stuff doesn’t mean you should focus your entire business on them, and the implication that you’d be successful in marketing a consumer product with ASCII art is mind blowing.

Lots of people want to buy our stuff!

Homelab tinkerers are essentially a non-market. They barely want to pay for the cheapest commodity hardware. Tens of individuals would buy Oxide racks or theoretical microcomputers with their own money.

This is the perfect example of a delusional HN comment. None of it makes any sense, most notably the idea that VCs are buying any of this server hardware.

It's so bad I can only guess that it's purposefully so. "sell like cupcakes"????

Favorited. Assuming this comment must be satire.

While I'm fascinated by Oxide, their style and work culture (if open documents are to be believed), I do think you're misunderstanding the homelab people a lot. Yes, I want the chance to play with an actual Oxide hardware in the same sense I'd want to touch a mainframe from the 80s. In the end though this is an extremely opinionated piece of tech that doesn't really invite or support tinkering. And homelab is about building something that no sane production-grade maker would ever be doing, so selling to this market would be quite an insane business venture.

I run this on a TuringPi board at home. I wouldn't get the TuringPi again but Talos for home use has been great. The only issue for me is I have access to Oxide so I moved most of my home lab there.