Because starting from scratch lets you thump your chest and say "See what we did" vs. the relatively obscure and often thankless task of making something existing better under the hood?

Before flash was even practical, computers kept BIOS on true ROM and used a small persistent storage commonly called CMOS for configuration. It could be a pain because the button battery that maintained it could die.

These days, you could use a small flash for configuration and a larger one with write disabled in hardware for the boot code.

On the other hand, by far the greatest threat to your laptop is someone wanting to steal it outright and sell it off. They're not going to bother with anything on it, just blow it away with a bootleg copy of Windows and call it a day.

The people looking to profit from information on your laptop will do it from half a world away while you are using it.

This can be used to regain access to laptop you won that has been hijacked by DRM you don't want. Since it requires physical possession of the laptop, it doesn't pose much risk to the end user.

I just disable secure boot. If the device leaves my control long enough for someone to do something with it, it has to be treated as potentially compromised with or without secure boot. Why create an additional recovery roadblock for myself? Security is a funny thing if you think about it carefully enough.

Always lock your car so when someone steals your $5 flashlight they also break your $500 window. Always install security lights so criminals can see what they're doing when they break in.

I realize those devices exit, but how many offer the features of phones at or near teh top of the market? Unless it can match that, it will remain merely neat tech used by a few diehards.

A very interesting technological challenge. I suspect phone manufacturers will attempt to find ways to block installing it on their devices, given the phone itself is not the only revenue stream but also user data. A cat and mouse game will ensue, much like Apple with jailbreaks. Good luck to them, it would be a great plus for users.

So the faster we help them develop, the slower the world population climbs.

Let's face it, many evangelical Christians have voted for an administration that would instantly deport Jesus to El Salvador if he appeared today.

I want a cheesesteak, pretzel and TastyCake

The upshot of my comment is that OEMs do have an easy option to not chain their devices to their cloud. They WANT to chain the devices, but then don't want to maintain the server and cry about the cost of their own self-imposed obligation as an excuse to brick features.

It's a scam.

ESP32 isn't all that new, and has never been expensive. Most of the OEMs doing rug pulls these days had the option easily available at design time.

That's a lot of word salad from someone who has never manufactured a solar panel or used one.

Sit down, son, a real semiconductor professional is speaking.

Solar power is free. Hydrogen makes for fairly decent storage once you solve the 'bleeds through most anything' part.

Hell, I get a refund check from my municipal power company every year, right here in California. Do you?

I haven't seen a power loss unless it involved a vehicle smashing into something that affects power distribution. I've been here nearly 2 decades.

You can put a web server on an inexpensive ESP32 these days. That server can be a lot simpler than the one in the cloud since instead of having to maintain many accounts, it only needs to handle 1.

Not sure why McKinsey is wondering how to sell something with "No Measurable Benefits," that has been a key consulting skill for years before AI.

That has been true before AI as well. Companies seem to think "people will just learn it" or "it's the same as before with a few changes;" and as a result training and all the other stuff never gets done right. Companies then wonder why they have problems and the promised benefits never happen.