Thanks for both the article and the video review.
To me this looks like a great product with a terrible timing. I would have bought the barebones version (no 25gb NIC, no RAM, no storage) at its current Amazon $599 price, sight unseen, at this time last year. Well, with RAM and storage prices as they are ...
From a homelab perspective I see the most potential by using the front (left?) PCIe slot as a bifurcated slot for 3 nvme (potentially 24TB of storage), the main 16 lane slot as a way to add a cheap 8 lane NIC (40gb/100gb?) and the third slot valuable as another nvme storage expansion slot (+8TB).
The article does not discuss if the 16 lane PCIe slot can be bifurcated (I assume not).
The article portraits the MS-02 Ultra as a potential server platform for AI ("the MS-S1 Max is the better AI machine, whereas the MS-02 Ultra is the better server node"). In this context, I wonder what benefit the advanced USB / Thunderbolt ports provide. While technically interesting and certainly useful in desktop-style use cases, any server-style use cases (think USB storage enclosure) have mixed track records making them hard to recommend.
