What's your point? A lot of simple devices are still being manufactured with cheap microcontrollers. Most of them don't even have an OS as such. If society collapses it's not like people are going to scavenge the microcontroller out of their washing machine and use it to reboot civilization.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484415 I outlined some extremely advantageous uses for automatic computation even in unlikely deep collapse situations, for most of which the microcontroller out of your washing machine (or, as I mention in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487644, your disposable vape or USB charger) is more than sufficient if you can manage to reprogram it.
Even if your objectives are humbler than "rebooting civilization" (an objective I think Virgil opposes), you might still want to, for example, predict the weather, communicate with faraway family members, automatically irrigate plants and build other automatic control systems, do engineering and surveying calculations, encrypt communications, learn prices in markets that are more than a day's travel away, hold and transmit cryptocurrencies, search databases, record and play back music and voice conversations, tell time, set an alarm, carry around photographs and books in a compact form, and duplicate them.
Even a washing-machine microcontroller is enormously more capable of these tasks than an unaided human, though, for tasks requiring bulk data storage, it would need some kind of storage medium such as an SD card.
