I guess I'm in the maker/enthusiast camp, but given how I think about these things, a lot of consumer IoT just seems crass and not that well thought out. Ill de

I guess I'm in the maker/enthusiast camp, but given how I think about these things, a lot of consumer IoT just seems crass and not that well thought out. Ill designed solutions to problems that aren't there. Actually, think of that awkward in between period for land line phones when LCD screens seemed like too much of an expense, but you could finally embed enough computing power to add several dozen layers of features whilst keeping the 9-10 button layout for cost reasons, which meant that almost all those features went unused, and necessary features became impossible to discover. Yeah, there was a manual, but who remembers all those numeric codes? We took something simple and made it harder to use applying computing power to it, which is quite the achievement. And now there's IoT, and I'm counting on the same thing to happen. Bosh deciding to replace manual affordances with WiFi? Please, no. Kafka please. This 'boutta be worse than OEM androids. Mentally I've put IoT in the same camp as VR and (soft) wearable electronics. Lots of excitement because it's living with the Jetsons stuff, combined with little awareness of the technical and economical challenges behind it, which limit potential applications to some carefully engineered niche products (say the Echo, Occulus, and maybe the fitbit. Notice how the Echo is "Internet of thing" for the most part, the Occulus big and wired and expensive, and the fitbit a bracelet because copper breaks when bent regularly, so you gotta have a solid piece) and hobbyists. I'm sure there'll be a killer app coming out some time in the nearish future, but your altair basic still ain't quite the PC. I'm miffed at schlep blind tech people pretending it is. Y'all ain't got no demo, y'all got Techcrunch tellin' you bout the promised land is here and no engineer to slap some sense into you.