I disagree that a true "blade" approach would be better, and believe PoE is a better alternative to PSU and backplane. My hope is Uptime Labs use the same appro

I disagree that a true "blade" approach would be better, and believe PoE is a better alternative to PSU and backplane. My hope is Uptime Labs use the same approach as their current half-rack chassis - zero electronics, just hold the PoE-powered pseudo-blades. Jeff Geerling made an extensive video series on the comparable $189 Turing Pi v1. In the final analysis of it, he breaks down how the networking part of the Turing Pi on it's own is $100 worth of chips. With the Turing Pi v1 holding 7 CM3 modules and the current Uptime Labs half-rack chassis holding 8 CM4 pseudo-blades, you might expect a fullsize chassis backplane supporting 16 blades requiring $200 worth of networking chips. Mind you, that $200 is for an unmanaged network with no VLANS or anything nice like that. Who knows how much more that would cost? $250? $300? More? I've got two Turing Pi v1 boards. One is a dud because the network switch chip didn't work. It's a common problem if you read through the Turing Pi tech support Discord channel. These things are hard to get right. Leave it to a vertically-integrated network gear company to come up with something reliable. I imagine two target consumer groups for these: Group A will chose this over some Ampere Altra server, so the cost of a fancy new enterprise PoE switch is likely well within their budget. Group B are Raspberry Pi hobbyists / "homelab" enthusiasts, and this is a group that's probably not averse to purchasing either a low-cost PoE switch on Amazon or a used enterprise PoE switch on eBay. There are many used gigabit PoE switches for sale at approximately the same price as a "managed" backplane (backplane parts only, ignoring R&D and QA overhead). Difference is, Group B gets both power and network for that price. For both customer groups, the PoE switch is also reusable if they decide not to keep their Uptime Labs chassis, whereas a backplane wouldn't be. If only a fraction of the chassis capacity were used, then with a backplane, you've wasted money on idle backplane space. With the PoE approach, you have switch ports that can be connected to other things.