Besides that I also disliked the philosophy. There are real disadvantages of existing hardware. Take a lock, if you have a cilinder because you need a physica

Besides that I also disliked the philosophy. There are real disadvantages of existing hardware. Take a lock, if you have a cilinder because you need a physical key you have an attack point. Add electronics on top and you only expand the attack service. Get rid of the exposed cilinder! Don't make a plane that flaps like a bird. Another argument. As an electrical engineer most of my graduates where reinventing wheels with FPGAs. That something is hardware does not mean it cannot contain bugs, I assure you. :-) Electronics itself improves as well. From lifetimes to power consumption. Everybody knows you should replace batteries of smoke alarms, but people don't always care: turn off the alarm and forget to place a new. There are many ways in which safety can be improved: test the working regularly, have notification messages go to the user if it is not, don't rely on battery only, but also connect the grid, make sure that false alarms can be quickly disabled, have campaigns so that everyone has them, make installation easier, etc. I wouldn't be so sure as the writer that Nest has a netto negative effect because they use a microcontroller in the loop.