I was looking at one of those new washer/dryer combo units recently (I have heard these are common in Europe but they are fairly new to the US market) and it had a unique feature where you could fill the detergent reservoir, scan the barcode on the bottle, and the machine would dispense the appropriate amount of detergent for the load.
I can see connecting to the Internet on occasion might be helpful here to update the local barcode database, but I doubt it should need updating more often than once or twice a year. Does that mean the feature will work without constant live updates? Probably not, but I doubt it needs to update very often to remain current.