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Why the smart home bubble popped
- protocolture 5mo agoWhat bubble? What pop? This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"
- tempestn 5mo agoI expect the more significant concern would be OpenClaw opening your front door for someone else.
- phreeza 5mo agoI think it's just a joke/reference to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
- AnotherGoodName 5mo agoThe smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all. The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems. The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.
- throwaway20148 5mo agoThey will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time. These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.
- weitendorf 5mo agoWorking on it, they all already expose a tool interface, you just have to know where to look for it and how to use it!
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoWe are basically already there, with HomeKit plus open bridge that can make any device visible on HomeKit (like nest cameras) and usable in automations (it works the other way also, it’s just a good way to get compatibility). I would like to explore some open source solutions though, it would mean setting up a local system on a Mac mini for speech recognition and local processing. Bonus is you could use Anthony Daniels (KITT) as your assistant voice.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoSynchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.
- nfrankel 5mo agoWhat I wrote above: >I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
- patchymcnoodles 5mo agoYou can have manual light switches and home automation. I have exactly that, but given I built a new house with KNX integration. All light switches are physical switches and can on/off and dim the lights. The only difference is, they are not hardwired to the lamps, instead they go to the KNX machine. So if I want I can always decide what switch does what. I have a singular smart home platform with one exception: my Dreame cleaning robot. Everything else is either integrated into KNX (lights, appliances, pool, window blinds, etc.) or Ubiquiti (cameras and doors). But again, new building and I made the mission clear: everything has to fit into this system. Was an interesting work for the electrician ;).
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- AnonEM00se 5mo agoI was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great. Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now. So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.
- shermozle 5mo agoMaybe you should put a smart power socket in front of the Ikea bridge to power cycle it every 30 minutes? (I'll see myself out then.)
- ramses0 5mo agoI actually purpose-bought a bluetooth smart switch, to which I have added a label called "The Internet" and a power strip to which the cable modem, router, home assistant hub, and whatnot are all plugged into. That way if "The Internet" starts acting up, I can bluetooth-connect from the phone and power-cycle all the downstream devices, thus avoiding the "how to I get the wifi to commit suicide, but still be able to reconnect it?" situation. Probably there's some other clever way, but that's what's working decently alright for me. :-D
- rolph 5mo agosmart devices dont play well. arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes. i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."
- paleotrope 5mo agoPeople tried to monetize it too early.
- vunuxodo 5mo agoThe only "monetization" I want in my smart device, is 1. I give you money 2. You give me widget. 3. That's it. "Customer relationship" over.
- anonymousiam 5mo agoPerhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.
- dfedbeef 5mo agoAlso the devices don't fucking work and all require their own dumb app most of the time.
- serverCntd 5mo agoya the one that connects via local network unlike the cloud provider ones are very unreliable most of the time
- NoPicklez 5mo agoNot my Sonos setup doesn't, have had it for close to a decade now. Would replace it with brand new Sonos gear if I could. Also, wouldn't be hard to put in a solution to block that type of traffic over the mic.
- phoronixrly 5mo agoWas this whole article just a set-up for that punchline??
- grebc 5mo agoI don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.
- cadamsdotcom 5mo agoThe smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down. My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box. That’s smart.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agoPIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN: 1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a peak at delta=+3 and sidelobes with lower frequency. Just a handful of observations when the codes were randomized will reveal the relative positions of the true code, and the only missing information is 10 possible global rotations, which is easy to brute force 2) A second approach is to not let an attacker learn anything by always presenting them with the same information: instead of randomizing, always reset to the same value (0000 or 9999 or any other value of choice). But in this case another attack becomes extremely easy: acoustically detecting the number of indentation clicks used per wheel by recording: without access to actuation direction that gives 1 bit of direction doubt per wheel or only 2^4 = 16 combinations left, easy to brute force.
- bandrami 5mo agoI mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
- DoctorOetker 5mo agoI'm not an absolutist, what I'm saying is that bruteforcing 10 or 16 states is neither inconvenient nor impossible. Its a lot less risky than spending time sawing open a lock box.
- rebuilder 5mo agoI think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one. The useful things I do use it for are: -heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing) -automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost -a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer -a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies. That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
- TylerE 5mo ago> Why would I want to automate lights? Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed. Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice. If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
- Retric 5mo agoAn alarm with a built in light does that slowly getting brighter thing just fine. These days a smart home doing that slowly getting brighter thing regularly fails.
- quadrifoliate 5mo agoThe reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability. Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly stay away until this is resolved. Skyrocketing inflation is not doing anything to change my mind either.
- vunuxodo 5mo agoPlus, their apps insist on advertising their other crap to you at every opportunity. Stop pestering me because you think I haven't given you enough money yet. Go away.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo agoIt also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.
- Ekaros 5mo agoLocation permission is the weird one. Well yes the WLAN network ties to location. But still why can't it be absolutely clearly separate from satellite positioning systems...
- Animats 5mo agoMost of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe. There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful. I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable. What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting. None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load. But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.
- JessieJanie 5mo agoGreat observations! I've no idea what the sales numbers show for smart home products. To me they all represent more effort to manage things I'm already happy with as is. My fav lighting gadget is the dimmer switch, which got introduced to the consumer market in 1959!
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoThe value prop is just really really low.
- recursivecaveat 5mo agoSmart home seems to suffer from the old-school AI curse in that it stops getting the name as soon as it works. Roomba, thermostat automation and remote control, casting content between devices, the video door bells, siri (to say nothing of dishwasher, rice cookers, laundry machine, etc). Anything that works gets bundled into an appliance and becomes normal. Smart home only means stuff that's at the edge of working, plus maybe some stuff that requires gluing multiple discrete appliances together (ie unlikely to work easily). In particular lighting for the latter, which has stiff competition against light switches.
- paulgerhardt 5mo agoRecurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate. Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product. Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app. Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years. Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day. Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
- ssl-3 5mo agoYou're describing those things as failures. I see them as successes. A smart device that doesn't need a subscription to feed and keep track of, doesn't consume hours of my life trying to get my attention, doesn't get shared with the world, and doesn't bother me with needless bullshit? It just quietly does its thing and it also lasts 8 years? That sounds great! Count me in! (Actually, I'm already a member. My personal favorite smart devices come with open-source ESPHome firmware pre-installed, and they have all of the features I've described above. These manufacturers make their money by exchanging money for widgets in simple one-time transactions, not by being sneaky under-handed rent-seeking slimeballs who live to optimize ways continuously extract money out of my billfold for the rest of my life.)
- jonathanlydall 5mo agoIt depends on what you need to be "smart" about your house. If you live in an apartment there is not much to be automated. However, (if like me) you live in a free-standing house with solar panels, possible power outages and all heating done through electricity, a PHEV you want to charge, being able to have smart energy management is actually very useful. Ideally my house should have 3 phase power, but I'm not yet inconvenienced enough to go through the headache of getting this organized. This means that at any time my maximum power draw can be 13.8 kW (60A at 230V). Generally this is enough, but I have on occasion tripped my mains due to drawing too much at a particular moment, I have the following significant power draw items: - 4x underfloor heating circuits at 3kW each. - 2x electric geyser at 2.5kw each. - Electric oven and induction stove, not sure on amount but I think they can collectively pull 6kW easily. - Pool pump at 0.6kW. - Inverter re-charging batteries at night (I only have 10kWh of storage and want backup power at night in case of a power outage), I can configure maximum draw here, but could probably pull up to 8kW if I wanted. - PHEV at 3kW. When we had regular load shedding here (South Africa) it was very easy for the power to trip if I didn't manage things, particularly if I left underfloor turned on in the winter at night. What would happen is that power would have been off for ~2 hours, then comes back and everything on a thermostat would turn on AND the inverter would start charging its battery. If I proactively turned the floors off then I wouldn't generally have an issue. Even without a power outage, it is possible to trip things when using stove/oven with underfloor heating turned on or if both the geysers happened turn on their elements at an inopportune moment. IoT can allow this to all be managed, it can have rules like: - Don't run ALL the underfloor heating circuits at the same moment, alternate between them. - If the stove/oven is in use, don't turn on the element for either of the geysers, it can wait. - Temporarily stop charging the PHEV or inverter's batteries until there is less power demand. - Temporarily turn off the pool pump if it would help. It can also create other opportunities around solar energy production, you can do things like have only "excess" energy go into your (PH)EV provided it has a minimum charge level. Other automations which I wouldn't mind: - Exterior lights on a schedule based sunrise/sunset. - When I'm away it would be nice to be able to remotely turn on/off particular interior lights and open/close curtains at particular times of the day. What I actually have automated: - My alarm system has (not great) app, I have wired it up to my garage door so I can remotely let in the armed response security company in the event of the alarm going off and I'm not at the house. - I use the Tuya ecosystem to automatically turn my geyser and pool pump off on a schedule and if there is a power outage or load shedding. This allows me to heat the geyser still even if there is a power outage and it's the middle of the day with lots of sun on my solar panels. HA is something I want to look at one day (when I have more time), meanwhile the Tuya ecosystem is very useful considering its minimal amount of time investment required.
- flowerthoughts 5mo agoMatter is hopefully changing it. It's a local first standard, based on IPv6 with security and provisioning in mind. BLE is used to give devices wifi or Thread credentials. Thread is a new protocol to replace ZigBee. Lower power using the same radio hardware. Ikeas new line is all Matter. My one issue, while building a custom HA controller is... There's no standard for discovering the HA controller and have it join WiFi... So that will require an app. Just to do mDNS and TLS bootstrapping. Maybe I'll use a cloud relay and Web Bluetooth for it. Would relieve both issues and provisioning could happen in any browser supporting Bluetooth.
- calcifer 5mo agoNone of the problems put forward by the article are protocol related, so I'm not sure why you think Matter would/could change it.
- The_President 5mo agoZ-Wave is tried and true, and works even without an available hub. I don't see the appeal to Matter from a professional standpoint. It may have it's place in the consumer market, but with product financing from major adtech firms it is clear the ultimate incentives are different than that of the licensed Z-Wave revenue model.
- Sweepi 5mo agoThe market needs competition. Apple has this reasonable offer: - Buy an Homepod/Apple TB as a home station - Everything works locally, even the internet is down. - no Accounts. - only one privacy policy: Apple's - but ofc, you can control everything remote, and Apple makes sure its easy and secure. Since its Apple, they have to make sure there are downsides, too (beside price): - If Apple does not deem it worthy, it will not get implemented. [1] - Things that should be simple are not. Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. I'll wait here. I see a market for a company which builds on home-assistant. You can tell the nerds: If "corporate" does sth you dont like, you can always go back to home-assistant. And for everybody else, you can offer a support, a list of compatible/certified devices, an extendable, open API, a vetted applications/script market place, a secure remote connection, ... [1] It has been a few years, but last time I checked, CO2 Levels still can only be reported as labeled Levels ("high/low/.."), with the actually ppm Value hidden in some auxiliary value. No way around it, Apple needed to put CO2{ type: integer, range: 0-10000} in some json some where, and they did not come around to do it for like half a decade, at which point I stopped caring.
- shantara 5mo ago>Try to set the lights to turn on 10 minutes before your alarm goes off I had a very similar use case: turn on my espresso machine (via smart plug) 20 minutes before I wake up. It should have been simple, as I already have a sleep schedule with a wake up alarm in the system. It turned out to be such a complicated hassle, that it put me off from using HomeKit for anything more complicated than “press a button to turn on a lamp”.
- yomismoaqui 5mo agoOldie but goldie: Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
- Nexxius 5mo ago...she laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed. I shot the toaster!
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoDespite being a techie and loving playing with gadgets, I've only recently (in the last year) got anything smart home related. The TP-Link smart plugs are great - they enable me to control a power socket over wifi/internet, so I can remotely reboot my media server, or properly power off our bedroom TV rather than leaving it on standby.
- ianmarcinkowski 5mo agoFor me, they just never did anything useful. I have light switches that work nicely. If voice transcription + LLMs + conversational AI had been good in 2017 I might have used my google home speaker, but the quality of the interactions was so extremely awful that I couldn't even get my google home to play music consistently.
- mancerayder 5mo agoPairing bulbs is either working perfectly or is a nightmare. You tape up a wall switch on an older home to 'On.' Some devices use wifi, others want a proprietary device (like Lutron blinds). Google home never hears the same thing twice, despite your best efforts to say things the same way. You'd think the tech would have matured by now.
- daft_pink 5mo agoPersonally, I find the biggest problem is the lack of a neutral wire in most older homes. It forces me to use hue bulbs plus a Lutron aurora in the 80 percent of locations where that actually works but I have to find a really expensive electrician for every other location. Plus most people who use hue aren’t even aware of the Lutron aurora.
- mcphage 5mo agoEverybody wants to be the shovel seller during the gold rush—the result being there's a lot of shovel sellers, and they all hoped nobody would notice that there wasn't even a gold rush to make people want shovels.
- b3ing 5mo agoI just don’t get the reason to use them. Eventually the smart whatever will not be supported 10yrs from now with your phone or whatever, then you’ll be required to buy a new one. Regular locks, smoke detectors, etc, can last the life of the house.
- olyjohn 5mo agoSmoke detectors only good for about 10 years also. The sensors do expire in them.
- datatrashfire 5mo agoi have to be honest, each time a friend or co worker has demod or explained their “smart home” setup, i have always been pretty underwhelmed. a lot of complex doodads, money, and seeming never ending troubleshooting, to solve what seem to me at least, as a bunch of narrow frivolous problems that don’t really inconvenience me very much.
- falkensmaize 5mo agoLike a lot of tech trends, home automation tends to be a solution looking for a problem. Video doorbells are a useful exception, but light switches, kitchen appliances and thermostats just aren’t something I need to be connected to the internet.
- phil21 5mo ago> but light switches The internet? Probably not. Having smart switches is great though. Both for very basic automations and laying in bed going "oh shit I forgot to turn off the basement lights" style moments. It's important though that all those things work together locally in a reliable manner. All mine fallback to "wired" mode if all else fails. The connectivity is just a bonus. One lightswitch near the bed to go into "bedtime mode" for all common areas of the house is pretty handy for me. Smart locks are a great idea in theory, but the horribleness of the residential door lock standards make them kinda suck in practice in terms of mechanical reliability. I went with a full blown commercial access system and don't regret it. Being able to remotely add folks while I'm traveling or allowing temporary guest access without physical keys is great. Honestly I find video doorbells a downgrade and an obnoxious addition to our anti-social societal trends. Although that's rather hypocritical since I also have one! The big issue for me in the Home Automation space is every stupid manufacturer wanted their own silly standard and/or app to "own" the user experience. Fuck that.
- camgunz 5mo ago(I run Home Assistant) Two things I would say. One, reliability is real bad. Sometimes getting devices connected is a ridiculous pain in the ass. Sometimes automations just don't work. Sometimes devices just go dark and can't be brought back. Etc. etc. etc. So, you don't really want to engage, and you don't really want to make it a critical part of your home. Or said another way: it prevents you from tinkering in a fun way. When kids were learning BASIC on their home computers, things were pretty reliable. Not always, I mean hardware failure or whatever happens. But it was good and the feedback cycles were short. You're not gonna get people curious and thus experts with the existing smart home devex. The second is we expect practically nothing from people in our culture. You don't need to be an expert in radio communications to know like, more walls between a device and your AP is bad, or that channels can get crowded. You don't need to be a tech wizard to know how to reset a device (you look in the manual or search online). We should be embarrassed that some of the most educated and wealthy people in history can't perform even basic logic or troubleshooting.
- MarkusQ 5mo ago> with all the excitement of programming PID controllers If that was what it felt like, I'd be one of the enthusiastist enthusiasts. But it feels a lot more like vendor lock in, meat-space spyware and security holes as a service.
- paradox242 5mo agoEven during the craze, I never understood why anyone would install a self-monitoring digital surveillance and tracking system in their own home.
- metalman 5mo agoexactly how stupid do you have to be, to not be able to flip a light switch on, as you enter a room, and then need to buy equipment and software, get it installed so that you can then turn the light on with your phone after you have tripped over a chair in a dark room?