What's more, most smart devices will not last until 2038. Planned obsolescence is a standard feature of smart devices product development plans today, especially since fewer and fewer of them are doing anything without cloud integration. If this trend continues, I would bet a kidney that no smart product launched in 2025, regardless of target audience, will still be operating (and be incapable of receiving updates automatically) in 2035.

We've bought one of the cheapest dishwashers we could find, and it came with a feature to connect it to an app using NFC. Granted, the whole EU is "very upper class" compared to most of the world, but it's still quite a huge number of machines.

I believe it. We've seen it happen with TVs for sure.

I think we're all both underestimating and overestimating the problem :)

There are way more "smart" devices (devices with some kind of embedded software and clocks) than we assume, and there are way less of these devices than we fear.

It's still gonna be a problem though.