[bevr1337]

> if you imagine a device has a 10 year lifespan, I would guess that making the provisioning hardware probably translates into at a minimum a full month of downtime over the lifespan of the device, with many devices being down for months or years at a time because no one can be bothered to figure out why.

Can you explain more about how you reached this conclusion? Why are devices offline for years now?

[lukeschlather]

The Bluetooth connection gets screwed up for some reason and it needs to be reprovisioned. The device is in a room which isn't really the domain of the person who can reprovision it. Whoever is actually affected by the outage can't fix it, has to realize that it's a solvable problem and ask the person who can solve it to fix it. This social problem of recognizing that a chore needs to be done will likely take at least a week, typically a month or even years to resolve.

And the whole point of this is to provide a seamless experience that's easier than using a physical switch. But in practice this just generates chores that are actually more time-consuming than simply using a physical switch. (Even in the single-user setup, I can imagine that I actually just revert to using whatever hardware controls are available on the device for quite some time because reprovisioning it is too much of a chore, and whatever wireless options it provides are not worth doing that chore.)