I also expect Apple to be the winner here, but for a very different reason -- they just seem to be the only ones involved in this market that also have the gino

I also expect Apple to be the winner here, but for a very different reason -- they just seem to be the only ones involved in this market that also have the ginormous financial and management services required to pull this off. The hip startups who sell web-enable smart watches or whatever is trendy nowadays won't come up with the first smart fridge that's actually useful, not because they lack vision or understanding but because they won't be able to build a fridge that doesn't suck in the first place. The SF get-something-through-the-door-quickly development model is fine for stuff that you patch in production, but it can barely produce a working thermostat, a device of barely sufficient complexity to be considered as an engineering diploma project. I've seen at least five projects ran this way. All of them were utter failures. In some cases, by the time the umpteenth prototype had revealed the correct direction, the market had long moved on or the amount of money and time spent had long outweighed even optimistic sales provisions. In other cases, the first thing that lasted through a fifteen-minute demo without crashing was christened an MVP, but it later turned out to be not quite what was needed because no one bothered doing specifications and studies, so the devil in the details made it a nightmare to use. By the time this was realised, it was too late to change anything anymore and an almost-but-not-quite product got released. Developing connected appliances is a complicated and expensive business and they require a great deal of interdisciplinary expertise that's very hard to find. It may not seem so, but a dishwasher or a refrigerator worth their money are a lot harder to design and build than the Pebble. (I should stop eating chips over my keyboard. Half of my past tenses are wrong because I have bread crumbs uner my D key. Crap).