Introducing Umbrel Home: The Ultimate Home Server for Self-Hosting

Announcements
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Umbrel Home
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Today, we’re thrilled to unveil Umbrel Home, a dream we have had since day one at Umbrel. We’ve always wanted to create the best possible plug-and-play home server that was specifically engineered for umbrelOS. And now, with the recent challenges in Raspberry Pi pricing and supply chain, it’s time to bring our vision to life.

Watch the reveal: Introducing Umbrel Home - The Ultimate Home Server for Self-Hosting - YouTube

We’ve listened to your feedback about wanting more performance to run more apps on your Raspberry Pi-based umbrelOS server, poor UX due to microSD card wear and tear, slow SSD speeds over USB, multi-step assembly/setup, and reliability.

So our team worked tirelessly to design Umbrel Home from scratch, crafting a powerful, compact, and user-friendly home server solution that exceeds Raspberry Pi-based solutions in every way and eliminates its shortcomings.

Umbrel Home is available to pre-order now at umbrel.com, and we’ll begin shipping in June 2023 to customers worldwide.

Umbrel Home packs a powerful punch with a 2.9GHz Quad-Core Intel CPU, 2TB NVMe SSD, 16GB dual-channel RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 3.0 ports, and an active cooling system. All this while operating silently and consuming just 10 watts of power (TDP).

Umbrel Home Internals
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Compared to a Raspberry Pi 4-based umbrelOS server, Umbrel Home offers:

  • Up to 3x faster CPU performance
  • Up to 6.5x faster SSD read and write speeds
  • 2x more RAM
  • 2.4x faster memory bandwidth

These performance enhancements have significant real-world implications, such as reducing Bitcoin node sync time by 3.1x, from 2+ days to just 15.5 hours, achieving up to 2.9x faster Plex video transcoding, and up to 1.5x faster file upload speeds, compared to a Raspberry Pi 4-based home server.

We’ve made sure that upgrading from an existing Raspberry Pi-based setup is a breeze. Our upcoming umbrelOS release in June will feature our new Migration Assistant, making it one-click easy for you to transfer your existing data to your Umbrel Home.

Umbrel Home - Summary
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We’re happy to share that the production of our first batch is complete, and the inventory is ready. We’ll start shipping next month, and we can’t wait for you to experience the difference Umbrel Home makes in your self-hosting journey. Here’s to the next chapter!

Pre-order: umbrel.com
Twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/umbrel/status/1663534602366091269

2 Likes
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Hello, congrats on the announcement and product launch!

However i must question the price considering the hardware specs. Its your product, you can ask whatever price you want for it, thats fine. But you should be aware that customers do compare and you should be able to handle fair criticism. As comments everywhere (Reddit, YouTube, etc) are eager now to point out, this is basically the same hardware as a Intel NUC 11 with the N5105 chip, added 16GB RAM and a 2TB drive, while removing WLAN, BT, HDMI, DisplayPort, and more… and then asking more than twice the price for this. (NUC with RAM and drive ~300€, this is 668€).

Even worse, when you just shared this announcement on the popular subreddit /r/selfhosted (link is still up), after receiving only a single comment as feedback, questioning the price, quite fairly and in detail i would say… how does the Co-Founder of Umbrel react to this? They delete their comment and delete their entire Reddit account.

I am sure this comment here will be removed within minutes from here. Or can Umbrel not handle any criticism at all? Was this just one person having a bad day, being stressed and reacting badly?

2 Likes
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Thanks for your feedback! Turns out, my original comment and post were removed by the mods (possibly flagged as advertising? not sure).

I hear all your points, but do want to note that the form factor of Umbrel Home is way smaller than a regular NUC with similar specs. With a smaller form factor, we also had to use a 2242 SSD, which are priced considerably higher, especially in 2TB configuration vs. a 2280 drive. The materials and finish are also higher quality than most NUCs out there, and we’ve put a significant effort into the product design.

That being said, we definitely wanna bring the price down further in the future as we’re able to manufacture a large volume.

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Appreciate you answering, thanks a lot!

the form factor of Umbrel Home is way smaller than a regular NUC with similar specs

Ah thats interesting. Smaller is always better for such a homeserver. But the form factor or exact dimensions dont seem to be listed anywhere on your pages? I couldnt find anything which lead me to believe that the size is similar to a NUC. Do you have a detailed specs page somewhere that i have missed?

we also had to use a 2242 SSD

Fair, but same as with the form factor, this info is nowhere to be found. And are there any slots left open internally? And im no hardware engineer myself, but it seems odd that you couldnt fit a more common 2280 drive into that, considering its only 38mm longer than a 2232 and you are saving a lot of space by not having any of the typical connectors like HDMI, DisplayPort and more USB ports. And a NUC usually comes with a 2280 slot plus a 2230 that is sued by the WLAN/BT module, leaving that out saves a lot of space. Or is that slot still there, functioning, so your box could be upgraded later to have Wifi? Again, this isnt made clear anywhere. So you see what happens, interested consumers have to make assumptions.

The materials and finish are also higher quality than most NUCs out there

This is of course more down to preference, but even so, materials are also nowhere mentioned, right? Is it aluminium? Only the top? Sides? Bottom?

Turns out, my original comment and post were removed by the mods (possibly flagged as advertising? not sure).

I am sorry but thats not how Reddit works. Your post is still there, only the comment is gone. And your account page also does not show the usual “disabled” or “banned”, its simply deleted. Even if some very harsh spamfilter would have triggered on your comment, its just odd that your entire account has disappeared. And i know for a fact that this specific subreddit has set very lax spam detection. And of course a subreddit (moderator, bot, spamdetection, whatever) cannot get rid of your entire account. But if your position is that Reddit banned your for posting a advertisement, okay.

And advertising of new products happens constantly on that subreddit, as long as suits the topic of course. But a company posting their new product, aimed at selfhosting, i think is absolutely fine and very welcome there and on other subreddits.

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I think that somehow you have shot yourselves in the foot. Do you want to reduce the price when it are now in pre-release? That’s why the price should be now much more attractive. If this is the case, when the price becomes mainstream, how much will you drop it to? To the same value as it is today?
You are a bit like Microsoft was back there with the smartphone. They made a mistake because they wanted to be more than software producers.
You will always be good at software.

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You can always buy a NUC11, install 16GB RAM, install a 2T m.2 SSD, install your favorite version of Linux, then install Umbrel on that with the command: curl -L https://umbrel.sh | bash

But not everyone has the technical know-how to do all of that or they just don’t want to be bothered with it, and would rather pay more for a professionally built box.

I think having a ready-made, plug-n-play solution is great for those who aren’t comfortable building their own. PLUS… It’s a great way to support the project!

Great job Umbrel!

1 Like
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why would i want to buy that when umbrel lost my funds last year?

even jim, your support engineer, who is very helpful and very polite tried his best to get my funds back.
i sent you a private message on twitter, unfortunately you did not have time to respond.

before you push products, you should make customers whole who lost funds on umbrel.

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when you say that “umbrel lost my funds last year” what exactly do you mean? If you understand how Bitcoin works, how is umbrel responsible for losing your funds?

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what do you not understand ? it is english. use a translator