For 'The It Crowd' followers, this smacks a lot of "have you tried turning it off and back on again?"
Sadly, all technology is going there. The complexity of designs is just too much to have product "just work". Phones recommend weekly reboots, more and more products come with hidden periodic reboot (or optional, but enabled by default, but if you disable it they fail regularly). It's the functional consolidation trend. It's presumably cheaper to have one MCU control everything rather than a simple micro-controller control HVAC, another simple microcontroller control blinkers and maybe lighting. With separated circuits, you can validate the design very well since each part does a very specific thing. They also don't all break at once, so failure modes are much gentler (and repairs are simple and cheap). But no, everyone wants to stick everything into a single chip, a single touch screen, even though that chip now needs 4, 8,16 or more powerful CPU cores. Oh, now you need to figure out the scheduling, all the software running on the same chip keeps interacting with each other creating an impossibly large number of scenarios to test. I wonder how long before someone who matters does the math and realizes that the complexity and validation costs outweigh the costs of separate hardware. The "software is cheap to replicate" dot com slogan is still firmly embedded in people's minds, but they forget that 10 $0.25 microcontrollers is still cheaper than many core SoC's, but more importantly writing, maintaining and validating ever more complex software has exponential costs. Elon is taking this functionality consolidation to the extreme, which may be a good thing for the industry - if he fails, he can serve as a great warning to others trying to do the same.
