> The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me...
All of those features could be provided by local compute, either nestled somewhere in the soft and fluffy gross profit margin of a $2,000 product, or with Bluetooth to a "thick" application running on a phone.
The reason this product, and so many other "IoT" products, put their compute across the Internet is to facilitate a business model. The industry has the technology to put as much compute, storage, and reliability on-site with a high-margin, high-cost product like this.
Even if it were a nightstand device rather than a phone. The immediate loss of functionality when loss of signal to the mothership is an egregious design flaw. There's no reason the thing can't have a bit of storage so it can then upload the logged data when the signal returns.
Of course, they'll probably claim AI running in the cloud is making the decisions which makes the local first controller not possible.
All of those features could be provided by local compute, either nestled somewhere in the soft and fluffy gross profit margin of a $2,000 product, or with Bluetooth to a "thick" application running on a phone.
The reason this product, and so many other "IoT" products, put their compute across the Internet is to facilitate a business model. The industry has the technology to put as much compute, storage, and reliability on-site with a high-margin, high-cost product like this.