[dguaraglia]

I agree. The problem is that "boring" won't make money and "great" is too expensive. So "boring" has to be cheap (read: crappy) to work for the manufacturer.

Unrelated, but I had a similar issue when trying to find a "dumb" TV: most of the high-end screens come attached to crappy software that you know will stop receiving updates 2 years down the road, and the cheap ones were super low quality. I got lucky in the end, but it took a few weeks of research to find the right balance.

[detaro]

Yes, it generally seems that "dependable" isn't a very good value proposition for consumer devices anymore. And in the speicific example, the enthusiast market, that might care about having things locally, is a) small and b) seems to prefer to get the cheap stuff and fiddle with it