I've noticed the opposite thing. Most of the hardware around is built on the weakest specs that still let the thing run. Those various 10 cent savings on flash and μC tend to add up quickly when you go into mass production.
But the primary problem, which is not limited to but obviously visible in IoT, is that companies ask themselves "what sells?" instead of "what is good and useful?". All that crap that is being created, with useless "features" that introduce security holes foster the fragmentation of the ecosystem, is pushed because someone out there figures out that people will buy it. But almost no one understands the implications of all these "features" so the buying decision they make is usually wrong and stupid.
I wish someone cut out sales people from the design process. You should be able to get designers and engineers together, having them ask themselves what would be an optimal, actually useful smartwatch/smartfridge/smarttoilet/whatever and how to build it, and then tell sales people to figure out how to sell it. But no optimizing for better sellability.
I too have seen the intense penny pinching, here in California the soda bottler removed one thread from the tops of plastic bottles, it saves probably a fraction of a cent in plastic, but makes the detached retaining ring for the cap rub on your lips when drinking. That makes it uncomfortable to sip from those bottles. Such a huge price to pay in user dissatisfaction for such a small savings.
Can't go this far though :
> I wish someone cut out sales people from the design
> process. ... no optimizing for better sellability.
In my experience, actually doing things this way leads to less economic success for the product and eventually it gets outsold by a competitor without those restraints. And At FreeGate I told sales people "you have to sell what we have, not what we don't have" and still had them come back with complaints about how the competitor could install their box in a data center etc etc. Not a productive conversation (or fun for that matter).
There does seem to be a minimally required feature set for selling things these days. "High Quality" isn't the compelling feature it once was.
There's some penny pinching, for sure - I had a coworker whose brother is on the iPhone hardware team and they have a lot of trouble with samples coming back from manufacturing with the wrong resistor here or a missing capacitor there to save a few bucks, because the factory sees it as overengineering, but doesn't understand the purpose it's built for.
That said, relying on an older processor may actually not save money. Sure, there's a premium on the absolute newest processor, but in general what's cheapest is what is most mass produced Right Now(tm).
I think a z80 on something like this was likely similar to the reasons that NASA control systems typically use the most reliable hardware they can, which means something that has been in use for many years.
For HVAC, maybe a little of each, but also the software may have been written to the z80, and if you change that out, you have to do all the testing you'd have to do if you built a new machine.
I often think back on this old chat I had with my grandfather, where he kind of tilted his head at something I was explaining about 90s tech and said something like:
"Interesting. In my day, we programmed the software to the hardware, it kind of seems like now you all are programming the hardware to the software."
> I had a coworker whose brother is on the iPhone hardware team and they have a lot of trouble with samples coming back from manufacturing with the wrong resistor here or a missing capacitor there to save a few bucks, because the factory sees it as overengineering, but doesn't understand the purpose it's built for.
I find that story utterly implausible.
The day Foxconn makes unapproved changes to Apple designs is the day that...well, never.
I think you have an interesting point but it ignores humanity. People want what they want for different reasons. As a marketer, it's probably easier to give people what they want than to change people's minds to accept what they need. I blame neither person in this situation only I'd try to change the system which surrounds them.
I know that salespeople can often be the source of bad decisions, but determining market fit is still vitally important. Who wants to build (or, more importantly, fund) something that no one wants?
But the primary problem, which is not limited to but obviously visible in IoT, is that companies ask themselves "what sells?" instead of "what is good and useful?". All that crap that is being created, with useless "features" that introduce security holes foster the fragmentation of the ecosystem, is pushed because someone out there figures out that people will buy it. But almost no one understands the implications of all these "features" so the buying decision they make is usually wrong and stupid.
I wish someone cut out sales people from the design process. You should be able to get designers and engineers together, having them ask themselves what would be an optimal, actually useful smartwatch/smartfridge/smarttoilet/whatever and how to build it, and then tell sales people to figure out how to sell it. But no optimizing for better sellability.