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These 1980s mechanical thermostats in your apples-to-oranges comparison, do they support remote connectivity? Over dial-up? To the steam-powered cloud? Do yo

These 1980s mechanical thermostats in your apples-to-oranges comparison, do they support remote connectivity? Over dial-up? To the steam-powered cloud? Do you realistically expect such a thing to be supported 40 years later at no cost? Phone companies are literally ripping out landlines or abandoning them in place. The closest thing I can think of that maintains ancient technology are alarm systems and you pay hefty monthly fees to help pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the infra. It also helps that the manufacturers of the hardware are still around and keeping the designs supported.

rightbyte 2y ago
I know consumer IoT using SaaS is a rug pull fraud, but yes, I except any such device to keep its functionality for 40 years at no extra cost.
what-the-grump 2y ago
I have a PC that is that old, still works fine. I have clients with production systems older than that. I have buildings with elevator controls that are from the 50s. We all do tech here right? It’s a simple infra stack to store settings for a device and report on them once in a while. No one is sitting at home and doomscrolling their ecobee thermostat for temperature updates. I expect the cloud infra needed to support the thermostat to be so cheap at this point that it’s completely irrelevant. I expect that ecobee spend more money on coffee than the infra needed. Fact is I bet that a free aws account can service a significant portion of the demand. I can connect up to 100 wyze cams to my account and store footage and remotely access them for the huge sum of 7$/mo. You are telling me thermostat configs are harder to handle? Bullshit.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  What utter nonsense. First example would be these units probably use some ancient depreciated version of TLS or cipher suite that cannot be upgraded due to hardware limitations, forcing the back end to support legacy out of date software. Then the headline would be "ecobee doesn't care about security" with the Hacker News armchair security crowd all over them, claiming without specifics they could do a better job. Please.

rightbyte 2y ago

I know consumer IoT using SaaS is a rug pull fraud, but yes, I except any such device to keep its functionality for 40 years at no extra cost.

what-the-grump 2y ago

I have a PC that is that old, still works fine. I have clients with production systems older than that. I have buildings with elevator controls that are from the 50s. We all do tech here right? It’s a simple infra stack to store settings for a device and report on them once in a while. No one is sitting at home and doomscrolling their ecobee thermostat for temperature updates. I expect the cloud infra needed to support the thermostat to be so cheap at this point that it’s completely irrelevant. I expect that ecobee spend more money on coffee than the infra needed. Fact is I bet that a free aws account can service a significant portion of the demand. I can connect up to 100 wyze cams to my account and store footage and remotely access them for the huge sum of 7$/mo. You are telling me thermostat configs are harder to handle? Bullshit.

wannacboatmovie 2y ago
What utter nonsense. First example would be these units probably use some ancient depreciated version of TLS or cipher suite that cannot be upgraded due to hardware limitations, forcing the back end to support legacy out of date software. Then the headline would be "ecobee doesn't care about security" with the Hacker News armchair security crowd all over them, claiming without specifics they could do a better job. Please.