I don’t doubt that at all. In my part of the world, Bosch is really only known for having better than average dishwashers.

Almost every new TV is some form of a smart TV now because a huge number of people don’t subscribe to cable or use an antenna. That’s unavoidable. Most fridges do not have a tablet embedded inside because people need a thing to keep their food cold and want the cheapest option.

I bought a bunch of new appliances before selling my old condo 2 years ago. All of them (literally ALL) had some WiFi capabilities. Some were even starting to market some AI nonsense. I very recently bought several new large appliances for my home and none of them have any sort of WiFi connection. That thing sorta dropped off, no one wanted that or really used it.

The USA approach to this is to mandate a comical number of outlets everywhere (to prevent extension cord usage), mandate a large number of individual circuits (especially for things that draw a large amount of power), and more recently some combo of AFCI/GFCI/CAFCI breakers (to provide some level of sensing things going wrong and shutting off power).

The stats are not great for the USA in terms of number of fires. I haven’t done deep research. From personal experience, most homes built after modern US electrical code was fleshed out are generally fine. Modern homes (or ones upgraded to modern code) seem very safe - the “smart” breakers tend to actually work.

My anecdote here is that my relatively small hometown area (15,000 people, largely built up between 1860-1940) still has frequent fires relating to electrical and heating systems and the current city I live in (95,000 people mostly built up starting in ~1960) has very few fires ever. I spend 2 weeks a year around Christmas back in my hometown. 3 of the last 7 years had a structure loss fire while I was there. In the same period of time there have been 2 structure loss fires in my current city total.

I think the switches are nice but in the modern world you really don’t need to unplug a vast majority of things. Even my $30 120V USA space heater shuts itself off if it tips over or gets too hot. My cell phone charger pulls functionally 0W while idling.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. GDP per capita is not really a good measure of quality of life on its own.

Historically the USA has brought a lot of people (most?) out of poverty by the world standard. Recent policy seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Quality of life has been declining for a long time, IMO mostly with our sense of community, the completely broken healthcare system, media consolidation, absurd levels of car dependency, high cost of having children, and a whole bunch of other location-specific factors (like cost of living in metro areas)

In this economy I think we can survive without the balls.

I would very much like a manner to manually adjust how hard the regenerative coasting works, which would sort of be a replacement for gears. If I’m going down a steep hill I’d like to be able to adjust the regen to maximize energy recovery while also managing vehicle speed.

I’m never going to buy a fridge with a tablet embedded in it, but I don’t really think they are making that much money from that. You can buy cheaper equivalent versions of appliances that don’t have the ability to display ads or collect/send data anywhere.

Some of these products already exist. They are expensive. If you go back and look at the long-lasting appliances of the past, they were also expensive.

One example is Speed Queen washers/dryers. Also Bosch dishwashers.