But wait, most people are going to plug these bricks into their phones or tablets, yeah? Those have data connections we could surely piggy back off so rather than a one time or irregular phone home we could have real time data on where the cables are and how they're being used. And we can release an app they run on their device to capture that information that shows a nice pretty dashboard of when they charge their devices, how much power they use, etc.

We then use that as the justification to move the entire product range to a monthly subscription instead of a yearly one. We can even remove the sharing restrictions to begin with, and then add them back later with a family tier, and eventually prevent cables from being away from the registered home base for a predetermined length of time.

We could then add an upgrade tier for those that do need to use their cables in other locations.

...Is this the kind of logic that goes through their heads?