[thelucky41]

"Hardware doesn’t need to become smarter, it just needs to be able to sync with our phones which can do the heavy lifting."

General purpose computers are quite good at what they do, however, there are a large number of tasks that you want done but don't need or want a general purpose computer, or a user, in the loop, which is what "smart" hardware is there for.

[dangoldin]

Good point. I'd argue that this was a more significant issue in the past when computational capability was lower and components were more expensive. Now that sensors are getting cheaper and phones are getting more powerful it makes sense to offload more work to the phones due to the benefit having it done via software provides.