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> But as soon as that assumption goes out the window - and if it's just you going into the garden to check on some weeds where the wifi doesn't reach - the task

> But as soon as that assumption goes out the window - and if it's just you going into the garden to check on some weeds where the wifi doesn't reach - the task suddenly becomes so, so much harder: Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area. Being able to visit the neighbors or go out in the yard without worrying about missing baby monitor events is a huge advantage that many parents will pay for. I think this entire comment section is a prime example of HN not understanding non-technical audiences.

mschuster91 1y ago
> Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area. ... and from people who take care of configuring their entire smart home crap of their entire relatives. In Germany we have a joke roughly translated to "Christmas is the time of the year where the children come back home to fix their parents' computers" for a reason - but a lot of people don't have family or friends who can deal with getting stuff set up. The average user isn't competent enough to deal with a setup flow more complicated than "install this app, scan this QR code on the device, enter your wifi password, that's it". The user neither knows nor cares to know that the Thing sets up a temporary wifi access point (whose credentials are in the QR code), gets the home wifi credentials via a small API endpoint, tests the connectivity and then shuts down the temporary wifi. For them, it Just Works.