&quot;This is not true. The Nest operates perfectly fine without internet.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll bet that&#x27;s not true.<p>All of the QA and QC of the product goes into its fully functional, online mode and the ability to function offline is ignored <i>at best</i> and at worst, intentionally allowed to decay and malfunction.<p>I have a good example of this:<p>Sonos music systems, on paper, can run without an Internet connection.  This makes good sense - why wouldn&#x27;t they play local music shares connected over LAN, even when Internet access is missing, right ?<p>But go ahead and try it sometime ... it doesn&#x27;t work at all.  No doubt some infinite retry connecting to the license server or the auto-update system ... some wait state or blocking that nobody ever notices since they always have Internet.<p>The point is, it doesn&#x27;t work.  You should be very suspicious of the ability for any of these things to work without Internet.