A carmaker launched an in-car assistant compatible with two generations of its own vehicle hardware, for navigation and vehicle management.
Backward compatibility is the detail that usually goes unnoticed and decides customer perception. A new feature that only works on this year's model turns a car bought two years ago into a second-class product, and buyers notice.
Technically, that compatibility is the hard part. Older hardware has less memory and less processing capability, which forces distributing work between what runs in the vehicle and what runs on a server.
That split ran through other products across the semester, with device makers presenting separate model families for local and server execution, precisely to serve hardware with differing capability.
For anyone building connected products, the example points to a decision that has to be made early: what is the weakest hardware that still has to receive the feature, because that defines the entire architecture.