I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
FWIW I use a lot of Hue in my house, and I've not had that experience. But absolutely validate the frustration. That said, in the present, Hue seems to be one of the most if not the most stable ecosystems for smart lighting. Which isn't to say it's perfect but I have far fewer problems than most people I'm friends with, haha.
When you use a compound word like that as an attributive (before-the-noun) adjective it’s common to hyphenate it. Precisely to clarify this kind of situation.
So the defunct smart-home devices from your smart home end up in the smart-home graveyard.
Same goes for man-eating lions and high-net-worth individuals.
Don't expect to see a Verge article written with something like a New Yorker style handbook in mind. It's hard enough for them to get all the facts correct.
Recently sold a "Google (Nest) Home Audio" device after it failed to accomplish very basic tasks like "turn on the light". I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible before it's completely useless. Like, it would succeed about 20% of the time on a good day. That number used to be 80%-90%.
I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.
Same experience here -- Google Home has turned into absolute garbage, virtually unusable. It was never perfect but holy shit have they poured gasoline on the dumpster fire with whatever they have done with Gemini.
Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.
When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.
I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.
I quickly realized that the only rational (for me) home automation solution would be 100% cloud free, off the shelf hardware. No overly complicated, security poor Home Assistant, everything is mqtt
Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.
Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.
99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.
If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.
The AI bubble is reverting the Cloud bubble. Services are getting shut down. No cheap remote computing anymore despite having the most powerful data centers. What are you going to do, make the light bulb to talk with a chatbot?
- Hue lights still slap, "just work", and have proved to be reliable over time. They are a big upgrade over non-dimmable, non-temp-changeable bulbs, or buzzing dimmer switches from ages past.
- Home Assistant's UX is poor
- I should probably try some of the temp control and security camera tools
Most importantly: These systems can be useful and have a good design without being cloud. A microcontroller and good user interface can be a big upgrade over a "dumb" system, without evoking the internet, or a Linux etc operating system.
I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
Yep I have 4 different presence detectors. A few units of each. None of them work in a way that satisfies my requirements.
Smart light bulbs are another minefield of low-CRI, bad connectivity, worse firmwares, nerfed local featureset, etc.
care to expand on which areas the units are lacking in? I've thought about getting presence sensors recently
I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
FWIW I use a lot of Hue in my house, and I've not had that experience. But absolutely validate the frustration. That said, in the present, Hue seems to be one of the most if not the most stable ecosystems for smart lighting. Which isn't to say it's perfect but I have far fewer problems than most people I'm friends with, haha.
https://archive.is/YTIq4
It took me a moment to parse that it's the "smart-home graveyard", not the "smart home-graveyard" that's getting crowded!
Apparently hyphens seem to have gone out of fashion. Please can we bring them back?
I don't think "smart-home" is a word. I've always seen it written "smart home".
I think they're just using the hyphen for emphasis here, not spelling
When you use a compound word like that as an attributive (before-the-noun) adjective it’s common to hyphenate it. Precisely to clarify this kind of situation.
So the defunct smart-home devices from your smart home end up in the smart-home graveyard.
Same goes for man-eating lions and high-net-worth individuals.
Don't expect to see a Verge article written with something like a New Yorker style handbook in mind. It's hard enough for them to get all the facts correct.
That's when you put a QR code on a tombstone.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/37/
"The smart home graveyard", aka Bot Hill
Recently sold a "Google (Nest) Home Audio" device after it failed to accomplish very basic tasks like "turn on the light". I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible before it's completely useless. Like, it would succeed about 20% of the time on a good day. That number used to be 80%-90%.
I wonder if I live in an alternate universe because I am only seeing good news about Gemini coming out of Google.
Same experience here -- Google Home has turned into absolute garbage, virtually unusable. It was never perfect but holy shit have they poured gasoline on the dumpster fire with whatever they have done with Gemini.
The only device I will connect to my home network, is anything that works with Home Assistant.
Wasn't that the same June oven that, well, was a smart arson machine?
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/296679-smart-ovens-may-...
Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
Question is - are these things good enough that restaurants actually use them? I would be surprised if they were.
My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.
When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.
My light switches integrate with Home Assistant, but I can just press the button or turn the knob to dim. Home Assistant Zigbee is there as a bonus, not the sole way of doing things and certainly not a single point of failure.
Not to mention the sheer reliability (uptime) of the LCPT (legacy copper plastic technology) switches. We're talking like 99.999% uptime here.
I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.
I quickly realized that the only rational (for me) home automation solution would be 100% cloud free, off the shelf hardware. No overly complicated, security poor Home Assistant, everything is mqtt
Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.
99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.
If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.
The AI bubble is reverting the Cloud bubble. Services are getting shut down. No cheap remote computing anymore despite having the most powerful data centers. What are you going to do, make the light bulb to talk with a chatbot?
Notes:
Most importantly: These systems can be useful and have a good design without being cloud. A microcontroller and good user interface can be a big upgrade over a "dumb" system, without evoking the internet, or a Linux etc operating system.
Can't we stop using the word smart to describe this kind of stuff?