Connected appliances and cars have got to be the stupidest bit of engineering from a practical standpoint.
It’s self reinforcing because those companies that get subscription revenue have both more revenue and higher valuations enabling more fund raising, causing them to beat out companies that do not follow this model. This is why local first software died.
Example: I made a firefox extension that automatically fills forms using LLM. It's fully offline (except OPTIONALLY) the LLM part, optionally because it also supports Ollama locally.
Now the issue is that it's way too hard for most people to use: find the LLM to run, acquire it somehow (pay to run it online or download it to run in Ollama) gotta configure your API url, enter API key, save all of your details for form fulling locally in text files which you then have to backup and synchronize to other devices yourself.
The alternative would be: create account, give money, enter details and all is synced and backedup automatically accross devices, online LLM pre-selected and configured. Ready to go. No messing around with Ollama or openrouter, just go.
I don't know how to solve it in a local way that would be as user friendly as the subscription way would be.
Now things like cars and washing machines are a different story :p
That, and also there are real benefits to the end user of having everything persisted in the cloud by default.
But by then my extension probably also won't be needed anymore as it would likely be integrated in the OS.