I recently purchased a bunch of hAP ac2 routers, and one of them says "revision r3" in RouterBOARD settings. Out of about 10 hAPs that went through my hands over the years, this is the only one that even has the revision field.
Does anyone know what it means or what changes were made? I use an ac2 as my main home router and wonder if I should keep this "special" one for myself

Look, I bought an AC2 around June 2024 and I also received this "revision 3", I can tell you that the only thing I noticed is a better wifi coverage compared to another AC2 without the "revision 3" field purchased in 2021. At my house I have 2 HAP AC2 from 2021 without the field you found an AC2 with "revision 3", all with wifi-qcom-ac and the "revision 3" one has an evident wifi coverage superior to the same settings in both the 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands, I have not noticed any other differences.

Thank you for the feedback! I was actually planning to use WiFi with this device, so that's even better for my use case.

I just realized that this r3 version is actually an international version. I'm in the US, and all other hAPs I touched were US model. I didn't pay attention to the fact there was a long list of countries when I was selecting USA. Later I was testing another ac2 and saw that the US model only has two countries in the drop-down.

storage still 16mb on rev3 ?

how much ram?

Yes, it's 16MB flash and 128MB RAM, no changes there.

Very often MT will +1 the revision # if they make even the smallest of hardware tweaks (typically as long as that tweak also requires software support). So for example, maybe they had to switch NOR flash vendors for one of their manufacturing runs/batches, and older versions of ROS do not support the new flash chip. It might be exactly the same size/capacity as earlier revs, but still requires a patch to the kernel in order for it to work properly.

Is hAP ac2 still being manufactured? I understand the hardware revision might have happened at some point in the past, so all your points are valid regardless. They don't publish any end-of-life dates or even product release dates. The hardware page on the main website only has the archived section. Does it mean anything not there is still actively produced? Surely they don't make the original hEx'es now that refresh model is here?

Is hAP ac2 still being manufactured? I understand the hardware revision might have happened at some point in the past, so all your points are valid regardless. They don't publish any end-of-life dates or even product release dates. The hardware page on the main website only has the archived section. Does it mean anything not there is still actively produced? Surely they don't make the original hEx'es now that refresh model is here?

I can't say for sure, but in my experience, anything that isn't under "Archived" is still actively produced. Their hardware products tend to have a very long market life. Perhaps they figure that, since the assembly line is already up and running, and as long as the needed components are still available, and as long as people are still buying it, why not. I'm not sure if this factors into their decision-making at all, but since I'm sure they sell to a lot of businesses, there are many organizations that prefer to stick with a specific product for as long as possible after they have committed to using it for a certain task (perhaps for reasons of consistency, perhaps for internal bureaucratic reasons, etc.), and for whom it would be a hardship if they constantly had to up-end their processes every 6 months or whatever because that's the rate at which the products they settle on tend to get EOL'd.

Now that RouterOS and RouterBOOT versions are kept in sync, one way to kind-of gauge the relative age of a device is to see what RouterBOOT version was flashed to the board as the backup bootloader. I did a quick search around our network, and found a handful of 'r3' hAP ac2 units. One of them shows "factory-firmware" of 6.49.15. ROS 6.49.15 was released just under a year ago. So this particular ac2 is at most less than a year old!

It is also a bit interesting that they are? were? continuing to flash the latest 6.49.x release to these models at the factory, even though 7.x had been out for quite a while by that point. In fact, even though this "r3" unit apparently came pre-loaded with 6.49.15, the "factory-software" (not firmware) shows as 6.46.8. This tells us that not only can "r3" devices technically be downgraded that far and still work, but also that MT is allowing for downgrades that low to happen. This probably also gives us some idea of who is still buying these things: unlike some models that straddled the line between 6 and 7 and even initially shipped with 6 (AHEM *cough*CCR2004*cough*) but which eventually switched to being pre-loaded with 7 at the factory, these haven't been...presumably because if somebody is continuing to purchase new units of a product of this age, they potentially have both a use-case for and a desire to run older software on it. And I'm sure MT knows this. If somebody has an existing fleet of ac2s that they need to add more to, and they want to stick with ac2 to keep things consistent, they are probably also going to want to standardize on using the same software load across all of them as well. Very common in large corporate / enterprise settings.

For the record, the small handful of "r3" units I have found all appear to be the international version, just like yours is. While the vast majority of them that we have are the U.S./FCC one. (As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that it's not possible to tell them apart in software other than looking at the countries list on the wlan interfaces. The reported "model" is identical between both versions.) I'm not sure how this happened to us, quite frankly. Best guess is that either we ordered the wrong thing one time, or our distributor shipped us the wrong thing & nobody noticed until now. But also: what are the odds? Makes you wonder if maybe ac2 buyers these days are few and far between within the U.S., and perhaps most (or all) ac2 manufacturing still taking place is primarily to appease markets outside of ours?

One of them shows "factory-firmware" of 6.49.15. ROS 6.49.15 was released just under a year ago. So this particular ac2 is at most less than a year old!

That's a good way of estimating manufacturing date, thanks for the tip. I wish MT would list at least the initial release date for each device. For example, I have no idea when ac2 was introduced on the market, and even trying to line up with WiFi version doesn't help, knowing MT was (is?) behind the market in this area.

The v6 vs v7 is a very good point, I haven't thought about it. Standardizing on v6 might actually be a more valid reason compared to standardizing on specific hardware. At least with MikroTik hardware going from one model to another should be pretty seamless thanks to the same OS. But I can see how going from 6 to 7 could be challenging for a larger company or for specific business needs. After all, the only LTS version for now is v6. MT should indicate which ROS version was used on test results sheets to give a more accurate perspective.

I just looked at two boxes from ac2 as well as physical stickers on the devices. The international one says "INTL/US", product code RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC. The numbers after the serial number are "347/r3". The US one has product code RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC-US, the numbers after the serial number are "133/USr2". But within ROS both have RBD52G-5HacD2HnD as the model number.

So I guess there is a "combined" package which really means international device with US plug, it's not some mix-up from the distributor.

I just looked at two boxes from ac2 as well as physical stickers on the devices. The international one says "INTL/US", product code RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC. The numbers after the serial number are "347/r3". The US one has product code RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC-US, the numbers after the serial number are "133/USr2". But within ROS both have RBD52G-5HacD2HnD as the model number.

So I guess there is a "combined" package which really means international device with US plug, it's not some mix-up from the distributor.

I actually had previously been aware of the "INTL/US" products that are the non-locked, non-US devices (always wireless, since this is about FCC regulations) yet packaged with a US power adapter, but had forgotten about it. It has always been a bit of a curiosity to me that MT even offers these as a valid SKU...I would think that the US would not be keen on the idea of somebody importing a product that is known to not enforce the rules.

But, check this: I stumbled across one new-in-box in the office last week that had product code ending in -US, serial ending in /USr3, and yet when I booted it up and went to config the wifi, it showed all of the countries in the list, and not just the 4 variants of "united states" and "canada" that I would expect to see! So maybe they messed up, and there are a bunch of "r3" units out there that were sold as US-only, but they forgot to lock them down?

I actually had previously been aware of the "INTL/US" products that are the non-locked, non-US devices (always wireless, since this is about FCC regulations) yet packaged with a US power adapter, but had forgotten about it.

NEMA power plugs are used in countries other than USA and Canada (which might have less restrictive regulations about RF emissions). So perhaps "INTL/US" should actually be "INTL/NEMA", but the guy in Latvia, who was tasked to come up with code for such device package, did his job half-assedly?