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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Nest is doubling down on the dumbness too. Their nest cams ship everything up to the cloud for processing!

What happened to computing at the edge? Are Apple (of all people) the only ones to still embrace this philosophy?

Processors are cheaper than ever, and there are multi-core multi-gigahertz processors with multiple gigabytes of RAM scattered throughout most homes but yes, as you point out, nobody wants to use them, they want to ship them up to "the cloud" or as we used to call it, "some servers on the Internet".

A charitable soul might say that by keeping local software simple, the end-user's devices don't need to be updated as often, while the software running on the cloud systems can be continually enhanced. A cynic like myself would say they prefer to use the cloud:

1) because it's easier to gather serious data about the users for later use/sale

2) because by tying users to an online service, they have something valuable ("2 million active users!") to offer when the startup inevitably gets bought out

3) because you can get away with less efficient code if you're running on a big timeshared server vs. on a small battery-powered device

4) because "the cloud!" is still an effective marketing gimmick

As an ios mobile dev, I get jealous of my fellow android dev's ability to roll out updates incrementally and to publish updates immediately. With a cloud model, you don't have the possibility of bricking your customer's device as a failure mode.

1) You can actually gather more data on the device vs just a remote service

2) SaaS moats are attractive from a business model perspective

3) TBH pushing compute on your customers devices is cheaper for the cloud owner, but harder to manage. On a per user basis most servers are actually VERY efficient. Most peoples smartphones are relative supercomputers, only some things will be very battery draining.

4) 'the cloud' does enable a lot of stuff that people don't want to manage manually themselves

Because you can offer processing-intensive features to customers who bought the device several years ago without requiring they buy new hardware! Look at the changes to what you can do with a Nest Cam, an Amazon Echo, and a Google Home compared to when the hardware was released. Particularly when you want to do various machine learn-y things on the data. Can't go retrofit 1M consumer devices with TPUs, but you can use them in the cloud.

Echo Dot is killing it with a $39 price point and doing all the intelligence in the cloud. And no hardware upgrades necessary.

By the way this use of "dumb" was as in "dumb terminal".

It's far easier and less risky to update, not to mention roll back, code on servers than it is on embedded devices. If you break the updater on a server, you can SSH in to fix it "manually" get a tech to replace the machine. If you break the updater (or WiFi driver, or bootloader, or...) on embedded devices in the field, you're up Product Recall Creek without a paddle.

In practice, this means that many companies prefer the less-risky approach which still lets them iterate rapidly on feature development, and fix bugs in production without weeks of QA.

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