You're looking at your phone on a day to day basis. Using your desktop. The router/switch/lightbulb/etc? All stuff that sits in the background and gets forgotten. Those things should do self maintenance - especially with zero days and issues that require updates to not be pwned the instant you connect to the www.
But realistically, it's definitely better for the "masses" to have stuff that just takes care of itself. Grandma don't know how to update router firmware and people like that are why stuff like Apple's "appliance" model is better than Androids more hands on approach.
I do prefer Android for streaming devices, there’s just too much value added from using Android there. But I use an iPhone because I just want my phone to work. And I limit my desktop computer count to exactly one. For networking, I use Asus Merlin. I don’t use it for its flexibility or features, just for the stability which this recent news confirmed was a good idea. The only special features I even use are an OpenVPN server, and secure DNS over TLS to cover my devices that don’t support DNS over HTTPS.
Depends a lot on the use case, though.
Yes, because I can plan for it. I can do it on a weekend or a local holiday. I can do it in the evening after work, or in the morning so that I have the whole day to go out and buy a replacement. If it's not critical, it can wait until my vacation.
And even without any risk of bricking, it should still be done on my schedule. I don't want the connection to glitch while I'm in the middle of a live stream, or an online multiplayer game, or a call with a distant relative.
Normal case: You lose some features / quality of life / stability improvements for a day / week / month (whenever you get around to updating it).
Best case is that you aren't in general population of bricked routers like everyone else today.
Worst case scenario is that you're late to a zero-day exploit. Although, the tech news cycle tends to report those stories pretty well, so you'd be aware of it.
The pros definitely outweight the cons in my opinion, especially on something critical like my internet access.
So against the one time you win by manually updating, you are weighing hundreds of times you had to research before clicking ‘update’ to see if there were any reports of this update bricking routers?
Because if you don’t do that, you just click the update button whenever you get round to it, you are running your router in a ‘vulnerable to zero days’ configuration, AND you’re going to brick your router the one time they ship an update that goes bad.
That's great for people who are into opsec as a hobby. But with the proverbial Aunt Millie I want auto-updates so they're patched.
Asus allows the option of having auto-updates enabled or disabled (forget which is the default).
Hardware and software companies have a story of implementing anti-user features in very shady ways (ie silent update to T&C allowing the org to track and share data with third parties and/or brokers).
I don't care if my smart Philips light bulb shares all its data with god knows who. My router? that's the device that manages all connections including critical ones. I want it to be impeccable and transparent. That's why I refuse to buy from manufactures that require a could account like Eeroo or that require weird connections to work properly like Tenda (a friend had a Tenda mesh and it wouldn't work if we blocked connections to Baidu, Weibo and others)
I have auto-updates disabled.
What in Earthly existence does not break eventually?
It's about dealing with the odds and rates of breakage.
Years ago I bought a $100 gigabit Linksys router, immediately flashed it with openwrt, and set it up. I assumed my isp was the reason my download speeds were struggling to hit 100mbps (new house and network all at once), and later when I bought my first NAS I assumed hdds are just inherently slow.
I had abysmal network performance for over a year before I figured out my gigabit router was the performance bottleneck, my isp was giving me 3x what the router could handle. The reason for the terrible performance was that openwrt doesn't have the closed source binary blobs to run hardware accelerated routing, instead everything gets squeezed through the cpu, and my router couldn't do it.
So basically, many routers lose performance, in my case I got a 10x performance drop, and openwrts website is all but useless for telling you which routers to buy.
All I can say is be careful blindly installing openwrt unless your router has a CPU that's complete overkill for what you want to do...and none of the mid range consumer combined routers/access points meet that criteria.
/edit I might be getting mixed up with netgear!
I have had an Asus for years and use the vendor firmware, and update it semi-regularly when I remember to, and have never had an issue.
I bought an Asus because they have decent capabilities out-of-box, but also because there is the option of using third-party firmware (which I've never bothered to do).
Even with this event I'll probably stick with the OEM firmware.