@Riley_S 

Hey Riley!

What you are talking about is the support page and has very little to do with attempting to order the correct hardware version that I've been spending over a month and thousands of dollars to do. What I'm talking about is what resellers and distributors have listed on their sites. Assuring that you've purchased a hardware version 2 seems like a near impossible task unless you have an endless budget.

What I'm finding doesn't completely jive with what you are saying. Different chipsets DO make a difference. Different RJ45 sockets make a difference for the level of CAT cable used as does the RF tuning for the antenna structures. These are small changes by themselves and I would challenge the definition of the word monumental when it comes to squeaking out performance for price.

I have ordered several units in the past month from Amazon and several different vendors/outlets. If they had them in stock. Many did not (Best Buy) have anything in stock for that model regardless of hardware version in the 5 stores I went to physically check on. Secondly, when asked to please check the model numbers on the bottoms of the boxes for the v#, they (like TigerDirect Business) refused or were not capable of checking before I could place an order. The only way to assure a ver 2 purchase was to completely purchase all their stock and sort through each box to find one with a Ver 2 on it.

Those that did look, reported to me that they were version 1.6, not hardware version 2 as requested.

For what it's worth, the hardware versions are NOT listed anywhere on the vendors posted descriptions of the device. As I mentioned, they say that these listings are taken directly from the tp-Link website for that item.

Said pages do not contain information about hardware versions, but do include some clues as the tp-link page for that product was altered for the hardware change. Viewing on the tp-link website, unless it is hidden in the code, there is no visible listing of hardware version. Looking in the web Time Machine that caches old versions of websites, show slight changes when hardware version 2 was released. This new info is always being dragged into other vendors (such as Amazon) web portals and they are selling the version 1.6 as version 2. 

There is no relevance to hardware version changes on anyone's website, so us consumers take our chances to get what the little birdie shot at.
In a nutshell, it would be nice if hardware changes were noted specifically in the web page so that vendors would also know the difference and give the customer what they want/need.