And people still have problems following that instructions. We gave a lot of instructions, but some people just don't read them. Or can't understand and follow them. Example from this week:

Yeah, main support guy for our client is on holidays this week and only a girl from sales is available and she doesn't know why our device doesn't work, she tried resetting her phone wifi but still can't pair our zigbee smart hub connected with usb modem stick (problem: no one told her she needs to message us to actually activate sim card before installing device for end client).

Yes, you can solve this one problem, but there are many more we didn't see yet. Consumer support does not scale and you can't write tests for something you don't know will be a problem.

Because the competitor that doesn't have this installation "hassle"¹ will sell more units. It ends back up with society choosing to behave this way in aggregate

Society is obviously good (wouldn't want to live without it) and capitalism held up for hundreds of years now (not sure it's the best solution but with the tweaks that are in place in many well-faring countries it seems to work okay for them), but I do believe "society" does have a tendency to go for easy and cheap more than complicated and thorough when the need is not self-evident and has not been tangibly pointed out in living memory

¹ Example of hassle that HN users may not think of as exceedingly difficult: iOS setup. My dad asked me to help him set up his new tablet. I've fallen for Apple's motto and was annoyed he doesn't just do it himself. So we sit there and... lo and behold, it's good that he asked me. I forgot the details by now but things like what the heck screen time is, whether the Find My network is something to enable, whether to enable automatic updates, what to do about Siri, whether Apple Pay is something he needs to use banking apps, etc. are not things he'd have any idea of and I can give the necessary context from my IT background even if I don't have iOS myself. However, we still needed to contact their support because we both couldn't figure out how to get an Apple account set up. The continue button was disabled. I tried scrolling: nothing. Tapping the button: nothing. No error message, nothing. Turns out, the flow was only tested in portrait mode but my dad wants landscape mode easier for typing and so we never tried portrait. A part of the screen was in fact scrollable (I've used Apple devices before and my dad used the old tablet weekly, it's not like we're not familiar with their design patterns or don't know how to use a touchscreen) and revealed a required input field that would have been visible by default in portrait. Next, even setting up a standard Microsoft 365 email server in Apple Mail wasn't self-evident, iirc because he had never heard of the word Exchange and the oauth flow worked across multiple devices with again different bugs in Apple's own UIs (one needed landscape instead of portrait, another required some trick with zooming beyond intended bounds iirc)

"Hassle" is already perceived in setting up what people proclaim the most user-friendly of systems. Units that don't need it will absolutely sell better, even if that leads to a potential national energy supply risk