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The smart home is a crappy idea because appliances, switches and fixed lights are supposed to last for decades before needing to be replaced. Companies have cle

• newsclues 5y ago
  I think the technology is ready but it’s held back by business model incompatibility. The smart home should be an open source hub that integrates appliances, switches and lighting etc. But the business model requires vendor lock-in closed systems.
  • teeray 5y ago
    It would be nice for the building code to start dictating some interop standards for this stuff to overcome the natural tendency of the business to make this a winner-take-all market at the expense of the consumer. At first blush, it feels like it would be a little out of their wheelhouse, but it's not entirely unusual since it responds to consumer interests. For example, Energy Storage Systems (batteries) are a new-ish thing added to the code around 2014.
    • conk 5y ago
      Codes abs standards have working groups composed of industry, consumers and inspectors. New groups are created all the time to address new technology. Unfortunately the initial cost to set up is typically too high for most individuals leaving progress in building codes/standards up to corporations.
    • Wohlf 5y ago
      Building codes are primarily for health and safety, secondarily to prevent getting screwed by contractors. Making rules on batteries makes sense but smart home interoperability less so.
  • qalmakka 5y ago
    Even if we assume that companies are willing to support the systems they sold for an undetermined amount of time (something that will _never_ happen), this still won't solve the fact that the hardware itself enabling the "smart" features is bound to turn obsolete way before the appliance exhausts its lifetime. For instance, I've seen chest freezers running for >30y without breaking; do you expect today's IT technology to remain viable for the next 30 years? What about new protocols that might appear that the hardware may not support, or new highly desirable features that are simply unfeasible to implement on the limited µcontrollers that power most IoT appliances? You risk ending up in a situation like with LPT printers - when USB became dominant, lots of old printers ended up in landfills due to how unreliable LPT-USB adapters were. The printers themselves were often absolutely fine, but they had become too annoying and keeping an old machine around to use them was much more complicated than just buying a spanking new network printer. Given the current dire environmental situation I wouldn't push for technologies that might cause perfectly functioning appliances to become obsolete due to a non-necessary secondary features. The only way out of this is for "IoT modules" to be removable, standardized and upgradeable, but thinking anyone would do that is delusional.
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      > but they had become too annoying and keeping an old machine around to use them was much more complicated than just buying a spanking new network printer. To be fair the problem of unreliable USB to LPT adapters was caused by this. It was more economical to just replace printers so there wasn't enough demand for a quality converter. If replacing legacy smart home devices is costly then it would provide a market for reliable adapter devices.
• voisin 5y ago
  The answer will be a SaaS model to encourage ongoing development and maintenance. Get ready to pay $1.99/mo for up to 6 smart light switches or $6.99/mo for unlimited, for the rest of your life.
  • omk 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't the failure of smart homes attributed to the SaaS model itself. Nest devices had to be killed because Google wouldn't support the subscription anymore. What it needs is licensing model and not a subscription. Get a smart home installed on your home like you'd install Windows on a PC. We are basically wanting to install a server in every home to cut off recurring costs on vendors and even dependency on a single vendor for that matter. The bottleneck here could be the network interface once you are away from your home. That is where standards struggle.
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      Looking at the sibling I currently see right below hits the nail on the head as in vendor lock in is bad for both SaaS and perpetual licensing models. I think none of the models currently work well for the consumer. If your SaaS provider shuts down its service you have to replace all the hardware too because of vendor lock in. If your perpetual license vendor stops making this produ t line or changes its proprietary software incompatible say 3 years down the line (which from a software development standpoint is reasonable actually) you can't buy another light switch for the new room you added by subdividing the basement "play room" that would work with your original installation. Software incompatible. New software or other vendors' software won't work on your 'ancient' hardware. Vendor lock in bad.
    • xtracto 5y ago
      I want a smart home that is isolated. Given that i know all the ways a computer system can fail, I want my smart home to function even when Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud goes down. Also , I dont want my smart devices to send or receive ANY data from external servers. Of course that's incompatible with current business models. So I prefer my home to stay dumb.
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• the_snooze 5y ago
  Even the value proposition is unclear. A simple mechanical light switch Just Works (TM). It's cheap, reliable, and nearly universally understood. Adding network connectivity, scheduling, voice recognition, etc. to these things sounds cool, but that novelty wears off very quickly, and you're stuck with features that probably won't matter to you day-to-day. It reminds me of those 3D user interfaces in the movie Minority Report. Very cool-looking and futuristic. Who wouldn't want that? The answer is anyone whose arms would be tired after a couple minutes of flailing around like that. Stop making things overly complicated for the sake of marketing copy.
  • vorpalhex 5y ago
    I think there is value proposition in a smart home, but I believe every manufacturer has missed the mark on it. My smart home is entirely app controlled (HomeAssistant), generally scheduled, and at no point does anything notify me unless an actual exceptional event happens. Every smart home device is controllable via a physical switch. My command and control centers are old android tablets acting as digital picture frames until you swipe on them. And it's really convenient and it works well. No voice anything, no needing five different apps, and the UI is stupidly simple. Most smart home devices that are advertised are a pain in the ass, the apps are intrusive and terrible, they are far too voice heavy and they usually don't play well with normal switches/remotes/etc.
    • simcop2387 5y ago
      I've got a similar setup that I started originally so I could turn off lamps in my apartment with mock lightswtches on the wall. This enabled me to have an otherwise normal experience since redoing the electrical wiring in an apartment is generally a good way to get in a lot of trouble. Being able to schedule or turn iff all the lights in a simgle action at night was just a huge plus
    • amelius 5y ago
      What kind of devices/sensors does your smart home control/monitor?
• typest 5y ago
  Agreed. People look at homes and things like light switches and blinds that have stayed the same for decades. These things seem boring, but the fact that they haven't changed is evidence of great design. Smart homes to me have always felt like tech looking for a problem to solve.
• AlbertCory 5y ago
  Bingo. One should aim for the smallest amount of complexity needed for the job. To turn lights on & off, a simple switch is all you need. If it breaks, you can go to Home Depot for another. If you're disabled, there are special devices you can buy. Same for thermostats. If you're going away for two weeks in winter, turn the heat down to 55. What's so hard about that?
  • jaywalk 5y ago
    When I go away for two weeks in the winter, I'd also like my lights to turn on and off to simulate my home being occupied for security purposes. A simple switch isn't going to cut it.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      A simple timer plugged into a wall outlet will. We've had those for decades.
    • AlbertCory 5y ago
      Right. For that, you need a timer, which you can also get at Home Depot for a few dollars. What else you got? The timer is something you can leave on all the time. If you don't come home before dark some day, you still want the lights to go on.
    • Tagbert 5y ago
      I use simple smart switches for that. I can use my iPad to switch the lights on and off manually or they can be automated. It does require some “smart home” components but the switches are simple and cheap. i always hated trying to get the mechanical timer switches setup correctly. I don’t go in for full integration of smart home features into appliances and such. Using smart switches gives me enough “smartness” without to much risk from a system in flux.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    > Same for thermostats. I've lost count of how many times I opened the windows and then went out without turning off the heating causing it to run at full blast trying to fight the winter outside. A window sensor + smart thermostat + Home Assistant solved that problem and the system has been reliably running for 2 years now. I can now open & close the windows at will knowing that the heating will adapt around that and not waste energy. Note that there is no UI, no voice assistants, not even screens involved. It just works in the background. Do I agree with the current gimmicky consumer-grade implementation of a "smart home" and controlling everything with your phone/voice assistant? No, that's stupid. But it doesn't mean the idea of a smart home should be dismissed - there are ways to actually make it useful and pleasant if you are willing to spend some time and/or money.
• Nemi 5y ago
  One of the main problems as I see it is that dumb devices have a long life and when they fail, they tend to hard fail. It either works, or it doesn’t. In contrast, smart devices have many soft failures. They work today and they don’t tomorrow. They fail for various reasons that are not under their direct control, and because of that they have a much larger mental overhead for me. For instance, I can shut the garage door with a traditional switch and be pretty certain it will close. Yes, they do stop working, but it is a hard, catastrophic event that makes me take notice and act. By contrast when a smart device fails, it can often fail silently and temporarily so I find myself constantly second guessing the thing I just did. “Did it work? Is the sensor showing me the correct state? Did it open on it’s own? I better go outside and check it.” I find myself thinking about said thing way more during the day than I used to. And this is fatiguing. Yes, it has some added benefit to automate certain tasks, but any benefit is wasted by the overall mental overhead it is adding back on me. Definitely not worth it except for trivial things from my experience.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    If you cut out the cloud and stick to local-only devices the reliability increases significantly.
• maigret 5y ago
  This is why I prefer standalone smart furniture and gadgets. All stuff that doesn’t need to be built in the house, but can be updated and swapped at need. Also, every time I ask myself really hard if I need this thing or just want it. What a house should have in any case, is a good network and Ethernet plugs in every room. This makes the addition of new gadgets much easier I found. I must admit I’ve not gone the WiFi mesh route, but it looks interesting as well. Guess I’m just old school on that.
  • lkois 5y ago
    I'm surprised Ethernet over Power doesn't seem to get more attention. It's basically Ethernet cabling without running any new wires. It was the only thing that fixed wifi availability throughout our townhouse. I'd be interested to know how a wifi mesh performs in comparison, but I can't see how it could be nearly as good, without being much more conspicuous.
    • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      I adore Ethernet over power, it makes my life so much better, but oddly doesn't get very much attention.
• zajio1am 5y ago
  > adding smart features to previously dumb devices is nice at first, but what about in five years when the software will start to rot and stop working, and probably become a serious privacy and security liability? There is easy solution - instead of IP-based IoT devices, separate appliance network based on industrial or specialized bus (e.g. Zigbee) and then gateway connected to IP-based network. With this setup all your appliances, switches and lights are pretty well isolated and with trivial software, and you just need to handle software updates and security in gateway. There is another problem and that is interoperability and long-term availability of these products. I do not want to buy products from a closed system of one vendor, but prefer some industrial standard, so there is hope compatible products would be here even after 10 or 20 years.
  • hattmall 5y ago
    I've been using X10 stuff for nearly two decades. So I'm pretty sure that already exists exactly as your describing.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  > People accept replacing ageing phones and computers because their connectivity features are a large part of the reason they exist. Though with phones, this is a relatively new concept. Phones used to last for decades. The phones in my parent's house were unchanged and still working after 30 years.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    I don't have a landline any more, but I still have a beige rotary dial desk phone that my parents got no later than 70s. It still works, if you can find a place to jack in. It's just a quirky decoration in my living room now.
• blippage 5y ago
  My mum kept trying to foist a wireless telephone on me, because then I could use the telephone in bed, or whatever. So this goes on for awhile, but the rechargeable batteries never seem to recharge properly, so the phone goes dead a short while into the conversation. I finally decided "screw all this", and got a cheap corded phone for a few quid. It Just Works (TM). We get the odd power cut, which means that my parents have to fish an old phone out of the drawer so that they can still use the telephone. Our internet is intermittent, too. People keep banging on about the environment, privacy concerns about big companies like Facebook are in the public eye, and there's plenty of stories of these smart devices stopping working. Yet people keep buying these overcomplicated, expensive devices with multiple failure points. I can't believe people can be that stupid not to see the obvious drawbacks. L'il update: when I was a schoolboy doing my 'O' levels, one subject I studied was Technical Drawing. One day, the teacher showed us a pulley. It was used in industrial machinery. It was housed in a little cage which swivelled open. There was a "nipple" at the top to allow for lubrication. I marvelled about how much attention to detail someone had put into a humble pulley. Later on, I came to a strange realisation: there are actually two forms of engineering: industrial, and consumer. Industrial engineering is for stuff that actually has to work, and work properly. Consumer engineering: deliberately designed crap. It's the kind of thinking which leads one to welding batteries onto the phone itself. In some respects, I feel it's the opposite of engineering. Then I think back to how there was some guy, decades ago, that sat down and designed a pulley that was robust and could actually be maintained.
• ddingus 5y ago
  This right here. I completely agree, and I think there will need to be standards that can endure long before we see smarthomes take off in any real sense. And I hate rolling devices. I bought a high-end smartphone, and a high-end laptop quite a while ago. I haven't really had to upgrade those, and that's really nice. Just a taste of what people want in their home appliances.
• ahi 5y ago
  My washer and dryer are at least 30 years old. Parts are still available and any idiot with a screw driver can fix them because they are so simple. Family have tried to gift me their top-of-the-line slightly used models and I flatly refuse. Less is more for the vast majority of appliances.
• conk 5y ago
  Lutron RA/RA2 has put connectivity into light switches for nearly 25 years. It’s still a supported product with many devices still in operation.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  What I want out of a "smart" switch is that it exposes an API over a network connection for what it can do (turn on, off and maybe dim the lights) along with a Unique Identifier of some kind. CPU and network stack all running on a Harvard Architecture system with no possibility of upgrade. The "smartness" should come from a device (be it a smartphone, hub-like device like an echo or my router) that maintains the mapping between device addresses, api and friendly names. That can be upgraded, replaced, exposed to the outside internet.
• D13Fd 5y ago
  > appliances . . . are supposed to last for decades I'm not sure this holds up any more. It seems to me most mid-range or lower modern appliances fail within a decade. That said, I only have one "smart" appliance (a Miele dishwasher), and its "smart" features were useless last time I checked.
• lostlogin 5y ago
  > fixed lights are supposed to last for decades before needing to be replaced. Only recently. Light bulbs used to blow rather too often and changing them was a routine thing. LED has changed that thank goodness. Smart lights have been installed at my workplace. They change their setting over 20 or so seconds ‘to reduce stress’. When you press a button and nothing happens immediately it immediately irritates, and most users press it again (cancelling the change). Who comes up with these crappy systems and the amateur psychology behind them?
• matthewmcg 5y ago
  I think the Lutron Caseta system is an example of how to do this in a better way, though it doesn't fully solve the obsolescence problem you mention. It minimizes the size and cost of the potentially obsolete part. The switches and dimmers themselves degrade gracefully--you'll always have a button to turn things up or down or on or off if the connection fails. And the connectivity is provided by a simple and responsive dedicated radio system, coupled to a bridge. You might need to replace the bridge in the future (to add support for a new protocol or whatever) but the dimmers should last (nearly) as long as the passive switches they replaced.
• jjav 5y ago
  > and probably become a serious privacy and security liability Given the quality of IoT devices, they pretty much become a serious privacy and security liability the moment they are first turned on. Agree on everything else though. There's a fundamental mismatch between parts of a house where the expected lifetime is measured in human generations vs. tech gadgets where the lifetime is months to a couple years before becoming throwaway.
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  The article doesn't seem to consider security devices especially cameras and intrusion detection systems as smart home devices which have seen the largest adoption worldwide. Households which have never heard about Alexa, Apple Home/Google Nest have IP Security cameras with robust motion detection/alert system and in many parts of the world they're credible deterrence as house owner having a gun is not a thing. That doesn't mean security cameras don't have issues, most are already part of bot net, will never get a security update, hard-linked to the app(Even RTSP is unavailable) and of course privacy issues concerning always on devices in our home sold by companies which don't have reputation for respecting privacy. But aforementioned issues can be addressed with hardened security cameras along with accessible self-hosted software which are now delegated to only those who wish to get their hands dirty.