>We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface with multiple wireless protocols and state of the art sensors with not a lot of capital investment.

Even on Amazon the ESP32 is less than $5 - means like $1 in Shanghai. Various sensors (even the ones with Bluetooth connectivity) are similarly dirt cheap. You can have a bin of such components like you would have a bin of bolts and nuts 30+ years. Basically we live in a golden era of development (which can disappear in US due to tariffs)

>If we think what can come beyond screens and imagine more ambient computing systems - maybe we’ll see new and interesting innovations

my bet is that it will be more robotics related with practically no humans involved. It is a bit of paradoxical - like for example if we add enough development to existing robots we can for example have an AMZN warehouse run fully without people which in turn would mean that we can have robots there much simpler in various aspects as the absence of humans relaxes a bunch of requirements.

An ESP32 module suitable for hobby use is about 4$ here in Viet Nam. You can get the "raw" ones for maybe 0.50$ less. We're near China, so electronic component price is usually higher than Chinese prices by 1-20% (modules and hobby components on the higher end). If you're ever curious about prices, the good online retailer here is thegioiic ('World of ICs', we love naming businesses 'world of something' here).

Locally, 4$ is probably "more money" to us than 5$ is to you.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a marvel that we can have something so good so cheaply -- but correcting for cost of living, it feels less affordable for us here in Asia.

Anyway, not a criticism. Just sharing a slice of life from over here in case you were curious.

You can only cover some very specific cases like that for robotics.

Also, besides some really huge companies, I would be nervous as a business to rely on a third party so much that I didn't have a workforce of my own.

Yes, it works for automotive (extremely consolidated sector with huge capital), or Amazon, or chipmakers... But they've already gone through that transition. Who else needs that?

I just bought a bunch of these and a reflow soldering gun.

The real bottleneck is getting custom pcbs made.

The best companies that do this are in China and soon will be tarrifed