[zzyzxd]

My water heater once emitted a cryptic warning light. I called a local contractor, the person came and spent 10 seconds inspected the appliance, then start dialing the appliance vendor's support number. Support asked him to press some buttons in a fixed sequence and the tiny display on the water heater showed an error code. Support said "yeah, that means part X is not working, but we don't know why" and the solution was replacing that part entirely.

"Wouldn't it be nice if the water heater comes with hundreds of sensors monitoring each part and emit metrics? You can diagnose with historical data and see what was working and at what time which part showed anomaly". As a person doing SRE in my day job, this was what I had in my mind at the time.

I am not saying that I want spyware in all the appliances in my house. But if I am an appliance manufacturer, I would always want the capability to manage appliances just like how software engineers managing software lifecycles.