It sort of makes sense for the dash button's original purpose. You probably wouldn't order stuff like paper towels / toilet paper / dish soap more than once a week or so (less for for most people), so 1000 presses would last you over 19 years.

Using the exact same hardware for a general purpose remote control seems like a mistake - an extremely limited product at best, an unnecessary source of ewaste at worst. A modified dash button with a replaceable battery would me much nicer, though I'm sure it's far cheaper to just sell a rebranded dash button.

> so 1000 presses would last you over 19 years

I've been wondering about that. They say you can use it to control lights/netflix. If you don't want 10s delay it has to do wakeups every 30s or so depending on the wifi setup to stay connected to the network. And wifi transmission is quite power expensive. If it does that, I wouldn't give it more than a year (maybe more like a few months). If it doesn't, the latency must be terrible.

An ESP8266 can go from deep sleep to publishing a request in less than three seconds. The expensive operations are the DHCP request and the DNS query, but that can be cached for hours, often even days.

Well maybe not 10s, but 3s is still a terrible latency if you want to control something like lights for example. And it's not all that uncommon for dhcp lease to last only a few hours (and we are talking about a case here when you use the button once every few days).

I used to be irritated with cheap led bulbs that took almost a second to light up. And with a wall switch you are pretty sure whether you flipped it or not. With such button during those 3s you'd be wondering whether you should press it again or not (unless it beeps or something like that).

The word is "obsolescence." (I wouldn't be able to say it any any other language!)

Planned obsolescence = obsolescencia planeada in Spanish, designing purposely a product that won't last to get money through client's pockets. Examples with ink for printers was on courts.