I was pretty excited about the switch to Orbi: performance doubled and coverage was great. While it had an app, it also had a full web-based GUI for management and included a depth of configuration options. The fact that the web console was a bit clunky and hard to work with was fine because I could once again control my network from a laptop.
Then the updates started.
These days, everything is “software-defined,” from networking to storage to WANs, just like everything was “internet-enabled” back in the late 1990s. Internet-enabled was an often-maligned term that many used to position old wine with new labels; the same is true for software-defined today. Software-defined, intent-driven, artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the most overused words in technology today, often fodder for venture capital funding as much as attempts to describe the product.