So an 8-27B on a LAN box wins for generic tasks on hardware that can hold it. Needle is for hardware that can't, like plain ARMv7, MIPS32 (the Ingenic chips in cheap IP cameras), RISC-V and watches. Also, we found cost to not really be the lever for on-device models, but availability and latency.
All of the demo setups (smart home, robot vacuum, watch, etc) could easily have access to a bigger model running on a more capable device either locally or via the internet.
And needle is one of the most promising model due to its original architecture (but we still need to finish building the actual eval dataset before making out final call).
But yes we are also considering bigger models, though we'll pick the smallest model of sufficient quality because not having to download a 600MB bag of weight is a feature in itself.