Engineer with hardware and software experience here.
Software is held to much lower engineering standards because it can be made much more complicated, by most measures of complexity; and complexity in hardware drives up development and per-unit costs, whereas complexity in software drives up upfront costs only, so most people push complexity into software.
Consider an all-mechanical watch. Even a watch that just accurately displays time and day of week is going to be fairly complicated. If you want the day of month to account for the length of different months, that's more complicated again, and if you want to account for leap years, especially the mod-100 years that's more complicated again. To say nothing of products like the Calibre 89 [1].
A product like Pebble will do all that without batting an eyelid, and a hundred other things that would be impossible to do mechanically. Setting the time automatically. Programmable watch faces. Scheduling meetings and synchronizing with other watches, phones and computers. Correcting across time zones and daylight savings transitions. Accessing real time train schedules and weather.
Software is held to much lower engineering standards because it can be made much more complicated, by most measures of complexity; and complexity in hardware drives up development and per-unit costs, whereas complexity in software drives up upfront costs only, so most people push complexity into software.
Consider an all-mechanical watch. Even a watch that just accurately displays time and day of week is going to be fairly complicated. If you want the day of month to account for the length of different months, that's more complicated again, and if you want to account for leap years, especially the mod-100 years that's more complicated again. To say nothing of products like the Calibre 89 [1].
A product like Pebble will do all that without batting an eyelid, and a hundred other things that would be impossible to do mechanically. Setting the time automatically. Programmable watch faces. Scheduling meetings and synchronizing with other watches, phones and computers. Correcting across time zones and daylight savings transitions. Accessing real time train schedules and weather.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_89