alt Hacker News> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.
Replies
Giving the device enough RAM to survive memory leaks during heavy usage would also be a valid option, as is automatic rebooting to get the device back into a clean state before the user experiences a persistent loss of connectivity. There are a wealth of available workarounds when you control everything about the device's hardware and software and almost everything about the network environments it'll be operating in. Fixing all the tricky, subtle software bugs is not necessary.
You're implying all software/hardware is of equal quality. I've had many routers with years of uptime, never requiring a reboot.
And I'm sure they had a lot of bugs, but not every bug means hanging to the point of requiring a reboot during normal operation.
Even a proper watchdog would, after some downtime, recover the system.
This isn't a case where you need bug free software. This is a case where the frequency of fatal bugs is directly proportional to the support cost. Fix the common bugs, then write off the support for rare ones as a cost of doing business.
The effect of cheap robo support is not reducing the cost of support. It is reducing the cost of development by enabling a more buggy product while maintaining the previous support costs.