CPUs are overwhelmingly more complex than a washing machine. Or at least, than a washing machine from the 80s with analog controls (new washing machines have CP

CPUs are overwhelmingly more complex than a washing machine. Or at least, than a washing machine from the 80s with analog controls (new washing machines have CPUS inside them). The problem, IMO, is that a manufacturer of a high-quality washing machine has the human ability to go through and engineer out or (or economize in) every conceivable failure mode. There's no need to issue updates, because it only does the specific behaviors that it was designed to do. Each part has a wear characteristic, can corrode, can be mechanically stressed...but a pressed sheet metal bracket is fundamentally always going to be a bracket, either it corrodes, or wears, or yields, or it doesn't, or else it holds the things it's supposed to hold, there's just not that many ways in which the performance of a bracket can surprise the designer. The owner's manual says it's to be transported carefully, installed on a flat surface indoors, plumbed to water/wired to 120VAC/drained through a standpipe, and then you operate it by adding clothes and turning the knob. It's a fixed-purpose washing machine, that's what it does. In contrast, Intel employed very smart, hardworking designers to write the microcode and HDL that describe the `vmovdqu YMMWORD PTR [rax], ymm1` assembly instruction, they thought about what that meant, what side effects it could have, why it should do what it does, and they probably were quite pleased when they optimized it to be faster when doing zero stores. But while the hypothetical ME for our washing machine could probably comprehend every requirement for the bracket, the Intel designers didn't build a fixed-purpose machine, they built a general-purpose machine that runs both trusted and untrusted code of unknown, highly flexible contents. The state machine describing all possible results of a Turing complete processor even with storage limited to mere gigabytes instead of an infinite tape, is unimaginably large. I maintain that numbers over a few thousand are humanly impossible to fully imagine, but to put it in concrete terms, worldwide, literally every second on the order of 10^20 novel combinations of 64 bit instructions are executed by a CPU, and every second, millions of programmers and computer users are generating never-before-seen demands of the hardwrae. It's impossible to predict every side effect of every combination of instructions a CPU will run. Meanwhile, the brackets are simple brackets, handing the same requirements and performing the same functions that the designer should have known about when they designed it.