It depends on the toaster :) If you want to toast bread in various patterns that will most certainly require software. Is it necessary to have that? No! But if

It depends on the toaster :) If you want to toast bread in various patterns that will most certainly require software. Is it necessary to have that? No! But if it cost little to nothing extra why would you not buy a toaster with this capability? esp2866 coast as little as $10 and that is at retail price. From China you can purchase the same device for as little as $3 at retail and bulk orders are probably going to be way less expensive per a single unit. AWS Lambda will charge you fractions of the cent per million requests and you do not have the operational cost. App Engine is mostly free if you don't have high volume. Hence in the upcoming years, you will see the adoption of this technology at mass because it is cheep and easy to integrate!