For more than a hundred years people were able to make ice cream with no code involved at all. I wonder how they were able to do it. It’s a real mystery.
That’s the problem with too many things these days. There is code involved. For most things, no code needs to be involved.
There’s a long-running joke among hackers (and you’ll see it a lot if you read Hackaday). “You could have done that with a 555.”
For more than a hundred years people were able to make ice cream with no code involved at all. I wonder how they were able to do it. It’s a real mystery.
Then they charge you just to read the CODE of what is wrong with THEIR product.
It is the same way with an automobile. At least you can go to the auto parts store and have them read the code.
Full Disclosure: I am a professional software developer.
With that out of the way, I think the primary reason embedded code is used in virtually everything these days is to lower cost, reduce time to market, and make things much simpler and easier to repair.
Remember when cars used to have an ignition consisting of points and a distributor cap ?
Today your car can often warn you when it has an issue, and take measures to prevent catastrophic damage.
However, companies often abuse the DCMA in order to gouge their customers, but this is no different that using proprietary parts , bad companies will always behave like this if they can.
IMHO, the real problem is when the founder loses control of a company, and the new CEO only cares about making a quick buck for themselves at the cost of the long term viability of the company.
” For most things, no code needs to be involved.”
For most things, code enhances their operation and makes them cheaper and more efficient.
I am curious which items you think that have code that is not needed.