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 I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..
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.
The math I have always done is, "If I removed 100% of my issues with controlling my home appliances and I was absolutely sure it would only ever cost me, let's say, $1000, and it was never going to need maintenance and would never fail, how interested would I be?"
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
1. Hey we can lock them in with these centralized services.
2. (A couple of years later) Hey we can make more money if we
shut down our old centralized services.
on time frames shorter than the expected replacement of the things being controlled by those services doesn't help.
At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
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.
You can get that exact same experience with Zigbee/z-wave smart switches. I have 74 of them in my house (replaced them all when I moved in) and haven’t had to think about them past that. They work by flipping the switch, they work by voice (Alexa), and via HA and anything that can talk to HA.
If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.
If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.
After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.
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.
If your device requires, in any way, an internet or cloud connection, even just for setup, it doesn't exist for me. If you have some FULLY OPTIONAL services I might like as a SAAS free or subscription option, ok; but the device MUST 100% work without ever knowing your cloud exists. It must also be designed to fail-safe and have manual fall-back operability (e.g., when the power goes out, I can still manually switch its state to OFF).
I recall an article or comment on HN talking about the advantages of a "MidWit Home", devices that weren't really smart, and just had remote control. I've got a bit of that with some remote switches to use around the house with enough range we can turn on from the car when arriving home. Also timers. Seems like a good way to go.
Even with local API I'm quite a bit hesitant, I'd rather not use anything that does not let me install an opensource firmware (e.g. wled for RGBCCT led strip controller).
I haven't made a vlan yet for IoT stuff because my ISP's router do not let met, I can't wait to have my own openwrt / opnsense router and put the ISP in bridge mode.
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 want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
I'd be open to smart home stuff if it wasn't sending data out to third-parties. Are there any good homebrew setups anyone is using that are local-only (or at least only sending data to a "cloud" I control)?
I've started buying Shelly plugs. So far I'm very impressed. They have wifi, including a local AP server you use to set them up and each plug is its own web server. (There's almost certainly some flavor of ESP32 inside.) And there's a physical button on the device you can push to turn them on/off. And they do power measurement. There exists a vendor cloud plus an app but you don't need to use either.
I don't even have Home Assistant; I control them with a 192.168.xxx.xxx address in a browser on my phone.
It's almost too perfect. Let's see how long they last before they cook their internal electronics.
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.
When I had to get a lot of work done on my house after a kitchen fire (appliance but not a smart one), I told pretty much everyone involved "nothing smart." (OK, the new dryer has a moisture sensor but that's it. Didn't have much that was smart anyway aside from a couple of Alexas that I use rarely.
I think there was also a novelty around a lot of smart devices that just didn't translate to much real world benefit. And in my case here, there was also the matter of having more pressing issues than fussing with smart lights and the like--like rewiring a substantial portion of the house when various walls were open..
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.
The math I have always done is, "If I removed 100% of my issues with controlling my home appliances and I was absolutely sure it would only ever cost me, let's say, $1000, and it was never going to need maintenance and would never fail, how interested would I be?"
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
on time frames shorter than the expected replacement of the things being controlled by those services doesn't help.
At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
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.
Isn't downtime the whole point of having a switch though?
You can set it up in a way that it does work without it but can be enhanced with it. Some zigbee switch work like that (Like the Aqara one).
Also, Home Assistant is the most rock-solid piece of software I ran in a long time, it just never breaks for me
Dumb devices work as expected for at least 20 years and then you replace them.
Smart devices work as expected for a year, fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them with dumb devices.
You can get that exact same experience with Zigbee/z-wave smart switches. I have 74 of them in my house (replaced them all when I moved in) and haven’t had to think about them past that. They work by flipping the switch, they work by voice (Alexa), and via HA and anything that can talk to HA.
If HA goes down I can just walk over and use the switch. A downgrade over yelling into the air for sure but my downgrade is your daily experience.
If someone comes over that doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to use the smart speakers, they can just walk over and flip a switch.
After moving HA off a Pi I found it to be rock solid and I don’t think about it at all unless I want to make or tweak some automation or I get a new device. Adding Claude into the mix for creating/modifying automations is awesome.
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.
Exactly!
If your device requires, in any way, an internet or cloud connection, even just for setup, it doesn't exist for me. If you have some FULLY OPTIONAL services I might like as a SAAS free or subscription option, ok; but the device MUST 100% work without ever knowing your cloud exists. It must also be designed to fail-safe and have manual fall-back operability (e.g., when the power goes out, I can still manually switch its state to OFF).
I recall an article or comment on HN talking about the advantages of a "MidWit Home", devices that weren't really smart, and just had remote control. I've got a bit of that with some remote switches to use around the house with enough range we can turn on from the car when arriving home. Also timers. Seems like a good way to go.
Even with local API I'm quite a bit hesitant, I'd rather not use anything that does not let me install an opensource firmware (e.g. wled for RGBCCT led strip controller).
I haven't made a vlan yet for IoT stuff because my ISP's router do not let met, I can't wait to have my own openwrt / opnsense router and put the ISP in bridge mode.
This is why I don't buy Apple products. You can't realistically use them after breaking all ties with the vendor.
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
What are you using for automations? I've been running HA for a long time but I keep trying to explore different options.
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?
Agree. At this point it should be dumbass cloud connected device with potential to stuff ads in my eyes and ears.
Internet of Shit
I want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
I would encourage customers to take Weber to small claims court to attempt to get a refund.
I'd be open to smart home stuff if it wasn't sending data out to third-parties. Are there any good homebrew setups anyone is using that are local-only (or at least only sending data to a "cloud" I control)?
I've started buying Shelly plugs. So far I'm very impressed. They have wifi, including a local AP server you use to set them up and each plug is its own web server. (There's almost certainly some flavor of ESP32 inside.) And there's a physical button on the device you can push to turn them on/off. And they do power measurement. There exists a vendor cloud plus an app but you don't need to use either.
I don't even have Home Assistant; I control them with a 192.168.xxx.xxx address in a browser on my phone.
It's almost too perfect. Let's see how long they last before they cook their internal electronics.
You know I have developed a habit of closing any web page that shows a popup asking for subscriptions or newsletter enrollment?
My fingers are faster than tachyons now and it saves me wasting time and brings me back to HN where at least the comments are more entertaining