Cloud service, extraneous account, AND a mandatory app?
Wow, at this rate we should probably tear one down to make sure they aren’t hiding cameras, microphones, mm wave radar, sonar, lidar, gas chromatographs, neutrino detectors, or portals to Mechanus[1] inside these things.

Jokes aside, this looks like a prime example of adding marketing buzzwords to a product that each make the thing worse at everything you want it to actually do.

[1] D&D’s Lawful Neutral elemental plane. Because…you know…cubes and automatons.

If a good way to run custom software on it appears, I’ll buy one just for that purpose.

I can imagine a custom Home Assistant interface on one of these.

The algorithms for solving actually make it really easy. The deeper key is that there are a series of moves that can swap / rotate / permutate certain pieces without changing the state of the rest of the cube, so you can do a sequential solve. There is a minimal set of only 4-5 of these moves.

How anyone could do the cube without knowing the secret moves is beyond me, but with them, it only takes 2-3 minutes once you get alright.

The speed cubers understand the things at a deeper level, and actually plan ahead using more complicated dual-purpose moves. But the absolute basic solve is pretty simple. My son’s class of 5th graders all taught each other.

Figuring this system out in the first place? That’s non-trivial.

There is at least one HAD reader who failed to solve it even once and he asked me to tell you that I don’t feel offended ;)

I hope it does well but I’m not particularly optimistic about it.