Because it’s convenient. As I leave work, my home’s AC turns on. When I arrive and open the door, my lights fade on and my blinds gradually roll up. My music seamlessly transitions to my home theatre with a tap. If someone’s at my door, it appears on my TV. When it’s time to go to bed I can turn everything off with a murmur. Adjust my temperature to be absolutely perfect without getting out of bed. When it’s time to wake up, the lights gradually increase in intensity, and my blinds automatically open again. I can ask for my schedule and whether I need a jacket while getting ready for work. Have my car turn on the AC as I leave my apartment, and have my lights, blinds, and AC automatically turn off when I leave home.

The little things add up. Life in a connected home is easier. I can spend the time saved on things that actually matter. All that is well worth the marginal privacy impact of HomeKit for most people.

A simple $25 programmable thermostat keeps the temperatures moderated. It may use a bit more energy if I'm running a different schedule than usual, but again - decades old, works fine. Car AC, again - works fine, turns on when I turn on the car. My blinds go up and down when I want them to, which has nothing to do with my schedule.

Nothing you've listed (or anyone else who talks about smart homes) is even a positive to me, let alone a time saver.

I also had a guy once showing off his new Apple Watch, showing how he can now switch his lights on/off on the watch and would no longer have to get up to do this. Literally 2 minutes later he showed me how his "Health app" on the watch would remind him every hour to get up from sitting too much, to "improve his health". You just can't make that stuff up.

IoT doesn't offer that kind of growth, though. These are all tightly packaged appliances, their whole raison d'etre is to trick you into a subscription to a cloud service. Unless you're running custom software on DIY IoT connected to Home Assistant, or buying a custom deployment from an old-school home automation company, there's no space to grow here. You aren't going to make your home more ergonomic to use than you could with dumb switches, dumb thermostats, remotes and electric outlet timers. You'll just spend a lot of money and tweak a few trivial settings on an app to get something approximating your needs, and then have half of it stop working whenever your ISP drops your Internet connection for a few minutes; you'll have to replace appliances piece by piece as services backing them thank you for your incredible journey together, and eventually redo your setup/configuration with the next big cycle of upgrades.

So no, I think it's not playing like Feynman's engineers. It's playing like buying very expensive clothes and jewelry - it's paying for status, and has no lasting value beyond what you can make out of your temporary boost in status.

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EDIT: FWIW had my phase of smart lights controlled from a watch - in my case it was Hue lights hooked up to my Pebble. It was more streamlined than you could ever do with Apple Watch, by virtue of Pebble having actual buttons, and control going purely through LAN (Pebble -> Tasker on Android -> Hue Bridge -> Lightbulb). After a week of fun, I realized that most of the time, it's still the second least ergonomic option (the absolute worst was controlling from an app). What I settled on is a combination of dumb switches when on the move (usually faster to reach than even my watch), and a CLI script when near my computer[0].

Also this taught me that the most important component in IoT lights is... smart light switches. Which weren't cheap or easy to get those 6 years ago when I bought my Hue lights, so I had none. With dumb switches, whenever I used them - or my guests used them - they'd screw up the light setup and made bulbs inaccessible over network. I ended up putting a bit of Lisp code on Raspberry Pi, that monitored for lightbulbs that just reappeared on the network, and immediately reconfigured them to a desired state. It's a kind of workaround that you don't get to do if you just buy into neatly packaged, cloud-powered IoT appliances.

--

[0] - https://github.com/TeMPOraL/hju

My apartment is a patchwork quilt of perpetually out of date devices each with their own utterly garbage app (or underwhelming homekit integration, or arcane homeassistant yaml incantation if I’m feeling really optimistic).

Various devices and integrations work poorly together if at all, the hubs are updated and old devices are left behind, a failed lightbulb update seemingly bricks it, but an hour of fiddling returns it from the dead, but now it still shows up in various apps under the wrong name and can’t be purged. Siri doesn’t know how to set color temperatures and bulbs look slightly weird depending on who set them with what integration.

My $700 air conditioner forgets about the wifi after being on standby for 24 hours and can’t be activated remotely when coming home from a weekend away. I have multiple wireless hifi dongles because they only work properly with certain devices. Some devices are MIA for minutes at a time despite strong wifi throughout my very modestly sized apartment.

I own smart home products from several brands and have spent hours configuring and/or debugging these things. I am over it. Very few things I have bought have lived up to their promise.

I’m so glad I avoided getting a smart TV the last time I was on the market. My parents smart Samsung is just a few years old, but, as I learned on my last visit, is no longer supported for many of the current streaming apps, so they need a new streaming device to plug into it!

I think a dumb TV with an external device is always better and hit this same path with relatives. The normal TV companies have no incentive to keep people happy for years with a dumb TV, so I use a laptop for TV and would only upgrade to a video projector.

We have "smart" TV that has never been and never will be connected to the Internet with an AppleTV connected over HDMI. Works well and when it's time to upgrade - which we are in no hurry to do - just the little box needs replacing. Unfortunately at some point the TV will fail, because things do, and then I doubt we will be able to buy one without its own dedicated 5G connection just for "telemetry" back to the manufacturer.

Good news, we've had motion detecting light switches for decades.

Time spent just configuring a pre-built system, that, in my opinion, is time wasted because it isn't likely that I can apply it to anything else.

I didn’t go into detail, but smart home appliances have more variability than I described. Let’s take lights. If you want to play a movie on the TV you can turn your lights off (all of them) from the couch. If you’re listening to music, you can set the lights to a warm relaxing glow. So on and so forth. Definitely more than 2 seconds saved, and in the end, it wasn’t just the time saved but the added convenience and personalization that was worth it for me.

Sure, you can do most of these things with “dumb” appliances, but that’s just it. You won’t get the same level of control, personalization, adaptability, or “smarts” - if any of that matters to you.

I could live without it (and currently am, due to an apartment move), but it was certainly handy.

Not used as much, but turning on the A/C before arriving home from a long trip sure is nice. That obviously requires the internet, but I refuse to use a third party.

Downsides - 2 dead smart switches in 2 weeks. They aren't cheap and should last a lot longer.

The same goes for hvac. Configuration might be more complicated but I'd rather walk into a sweltering home than have a massive power bill when some script kid pwns my system and sets the temp to 50f for two weeks.

Humor aside, I'm still interested in what you are referring to. I'm not aware of a way to do that, but maybe didn't know what to look for.

I was interested in a thermostat with an API that worked locally, no internet needed and no 3rd party required and that is what I went with. Paired with the alarm system (old school, hard wired, it doesn't know what the internet is) it can alert me when the A/C is on, but a window is open.

A 7 day may not be sufficient for an 8 day trip unless you can have a friend or family member drop by to adjust the settings, but I'm definitely going to keep this in the back of my head for when I inevitably need to upgrade my HVAC.

The automated lights and blinds in the morning, for example, can for some improve sleep quality compared to a standard alarm. Then again this would probably be better as dumb blinds and lights on timers.

I have a few smart switches that I can't say are anything more than convenience, but one smart plug paid for itself in 7 months and now saves me a whooping $4 per month on propane. A dumb timer would almost work, but the smart plug makes it so I can handle the exceptions to the rule.

I don't have AC. If I turn off the heat, my pipes will burst. I can't see a reason to turn lights or fridges on/off when I'm not there.

> just don't say silly things like "automation, lame!"

I didn't. I said I honestly can't see the utility in any of it.

For many people (including me), manually adjusting AC and lights or getting up to check the door simply isn't enough of a pain point to create interest in smart devices.

Nothing wrong with liking cool stuff, but this type of argument doesn’t resonate with me.

I had 2 die recently. The is a thread out there on repairing them, but I don't think my soldering skills are that good. I'm also thinking "repair my light switch?" What has the world come to?

I don’t care about any of this automatic timing or app control. What I want is for every lightbulb in my house set to the same color temperature, and for that temperature to change over the course of the day - circadian lighting like f.lux for my entire house. It seemed to me that this should be possible with hue bulbs, but it turns out they can’t work that way unless I want to also replace all of the switches in my house with “smart” switches.

The point is that when you wake up and it’s cold in your house, and you don’t want to get out of bed, you can flip on your heat and warm up the house while you’re still waking up.

Or if you left the house and forgot if you turned off the lights. Or left the AC on for the pets. Your 25 year old switches aren’t going to help you there.

Or another one I always use - if it’s raining out and I have full hands, I will unlock my front door before I get out of my car, so I can just walk right in.

Because that literally was the sole point of benefits in the GP post!

> The little things add up. Life in a connected home is easier

I think the fact that you interpreted that, followed by a point about saving time, as only implying saved time is part of the huge disconnect in these discussions.

Some of the functionality saves me time. When I don't have to go downstairs to turn off a light I forgot downstairs when I've already gotten into bed, saves time, sure. But the saved time, to me at least, is entirely incidental.

I have no idea whether it adds up to enough to offset the time I've taken to set things up (I also, however, think that people massively overestimate the effort involved; I set up a couple of hubs, replaced the lightbulbs in my house in a couple of hours total several years ago; replaced radiator valves in a couple of hours), but it's entirely irrelevant to me.

I would do this all over again even if I knew it'd take me ten times as long to set up as all the time I'll "save" over my lifetime

Because I value the comfort of e.g. adjusting the heating before I get up (yes, I can get timers; my thermostat already uses a timer, but sometimes I deviate from my normal schedule), or turn off the light without having to get back out of bed far more than the time saved.

We all have things we invest time in preparing for so that the event itself doesn't get interrupted by small annoyances, even if it doesn't "pay off" in saved time. A "smart home" is that first and foremost.

But even after that, it’s not just about the time saved. It’s an increased amount of convenience in day to day life. I mentioned this in another comment, but you definitely feel a sort of reduction in cognitive load when your desired home state can be triggered with a spoken word.

Would that that were true. Internet of Shit is rife with examples of products that fail completely without connectivity.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

So much time, energy and money spent on something that tells you who's at the door or if you need a damned jacket... So many gadgets that need to be manufactured and shipped to the other side of the world to open your blinds... I can already see a future in which people don't know how to use a "dumb" door knobs

All this shit will end up in a landfill in less than 50 years, and probably be deprecated well before. The amount of waste generated for such a minor improvement of quality of life over good old proven tech which are a fraction of the cost, waste and maintenance (light switches, regular timed central heating/cooling, weather reports and peepholes). These things are the literal opposite of sustainability.

Did we all collectively go mad ?

I've been a fan for about 5 years now and I have everything connected as well. It used to be a big pain and it still can be sometimes, so I don't agree 100% with the comment you replied on that it saves time in a significant way. Though I assume that depends on your setup and how much you tinker with it. I know I will never get back the time I invested over the years in trying to make things work by not having to press light switches anymore.

But you know what? It's fun. I like it. It's the closest thing to an Iron Man like house we have so far. And I will be damned if I let it be ruined by you shaking your head and calling us enthusiasts mad.

That's the only argument I can accept, "it's cool". I still believe it's not sustainable in any way, shape or form and that it's going to be a major pain in the ass down the line both in term of waste and long term maintenance.

It's like huge diesel trucks running straight pipes, some people think it's fun, I'm glad most people don't and that most places ban them.

We'd get more time to spend on "real life" if we used automation's productivity improvements to reduce working hours to 4 hours a day rather than by getting gadgets rolling our blinds and setting the AC automatically.

I mean, I agree - of course we'd be better off if we finally got a grip on our mad consumerism. Granted, I don't have any numbers, but from my gut feeling, I would wager that huge diesel trucks are a bit more extreme, impact wise. Of course these gadgets are not great from an environmental perspective. But pretty much nothing is if you break it down. You can expand your argument to almost any area. From phones to gaming consoles to plastic toys for kids to clothes ... everything is going to end up in a landfill eventually and we'd be better off not using these things in the first place. I hope this doesn't sound like whataboutism, that's not what I try to say. I just think it's kind of odd to single out smart home devices when talking about the environment. I'd be gladly proven wrong though.

I don't quite know what to make of the last sentence of your comment. Yeah, automation's productivity improvements to reduce working hours to 4 hours a day would be sweet. Sign me up, I'd even sacrifice all my smart home stuff for it. But it's got literally nothing to do with the argument at hand. It's not like the people have chosen that we want to control our lights with our voice over cutting our working days in half. Unless you mean that you just can't understand the argument that the smart home automation gives us more time to focus on real life. That I agree with. But again, that's not the point. It's fun.

Regarding long term maintenance: we're in the very early stages still. I sincerely hope for more cross-compatibility further down the road. Also, open source projects have done wonders so far to increase the maintainability of smart home products. But that's for enthusiasts, not your everyday I-bought-alexa-and-hue smart home fan.

Last year my parent's electric blind motor died, no manual backup, they had to wait two weeks for a replacement, this was a large window/door thing, it was in closed position and blocked 70% of the daylight in the living room/kitchen. The house is not even 5 years old, I dread the day I inherit it and have to deal with this bs

These are more growing pains than anything else. Adding a HomeKit appliance is absurdly simply these days (you just scan it with your phone) and then it just works.

> the "time saved" is a bit like saying modal editors are good because you can enter text more efficiently

It’s not an insignificant amount. If you live in a highly connected smart home, you will definitely notice the saved time and you will definitely notice how you simply have to do less things. There’s a sort of lightened cognitive load that’s difficult to describe. Things just feel more chill when you can adjust conditions to perfection without lifting a finger.

I have always loved the idea of a connected house, but I haven't yet seen a feature that would make it worth the trouble of installation, added cost, and yet another app to control my life.

It's always interesting to see vestiges of a home intercom in really old homes, the phone jacks in bedrooms, ladder-style wire for TV aerials mounted in the walls, bits of some kind of home-alarm system....

Most of these systems today also let you put in place one hub per standard you care about, and then just update devices, and you can mix and match. Some, like Zigbee, are standards supported by multiple manufacturers. The radiator thermostat interface I rely on is standard for UK radiators at least, and is physical and pre-dates electronic thermostats by decades - the smart thermostats physically press down on a switch on the radiators; to replace them with another standard - or a manual one - you just twist the old one off and twist a new one one, done in ~2 minutes.

They similarly communicate with a hub, and an optional central boiler thermostat. The boiler thermostat is the only part that took any time to figure out (but there are plenty of installer services available), and the thermostat interface for boilers in the UK at least is built so that anyone can build replacements; you just need something that can switch a current.

Keep in mind that the only thing that is new here is the network enabled smart control - many of the interfaces are already really old and established.

I have ~20 Zigbee lightbulbs. I also have some LightwaveRF switches. As I refurbish and/or as the Zigbee bulbs die, I'll slowly replace the Zigbee lightbulbs with Lightwave switches as they are more convenient. But the difference is small enough that I've not bothered going over the house to replace them all. If either one of them become hard or expensive to come by, I'll just at that point add a hub that can bridge between a new standard and whatever device I use to interact with them. Setting up the Lightwave hub took me less than half an hour. If I have to invest half an hour to add a new type of hub every 10-20 years, I'm fine with that.

In this case, if Lightwave "dies" entirely and becomes impossible to support, I'll lose the smart functionality of those switches, but nothing else is hard-wired (the Zigbee setup is all mesh between the bulbs themselves, and a hub built into one of my Alexas, and they too require no extra wiring that a normal switch doesn't, and fall back to working like a slightly fancy normal switch if the network is unavailable, and someone unaware of Lightwave wouldn't know anything was broken. And that's what I'd face while transitioning to something new.

After 2 hours of debugging he told me all he could think of is what is wrong with just a plain light switch.

This stuff is great when it works but when it fails it’s just a huge frustrating time suck.

I think we simply don’t notice the amount of time spent on the little, meaningless things. For me, once things were connected it kind of felt like I had aliased a commonly-used command.

You could also argue that the saved time was already spent in researching which smart home appliances to get (bad ones can be a flaky nightmare), which is a fair argument. For me, though, the increased convenience in actual day to day use was well worth it.

Connections are always broke, wifi passwords are forgotten, sites not accessible, phone number does not pass verification process etc. Thankfully, all my devices still have buttons that allow them to operate without internet connection, but I fear that will not be the case in the future ..

As a software engineer with a master's degree in computer science engineering and over a decade of experience working on high reliability embedded systems, I'm about ready to just give up and expel any electronics from my home more elaborate than a dimmable LED lightbulb.

On the other hand, maybe consumer electronics are flaky for me due to the fact that there's 20+ other wifi access points in range besides my own, and half my electric sockets are still on 100 year old knob and tube wiring...

Wether they use a Zigbee under the hood is orthogonal.

I think its fair to point out that those things don't have to be proprietary. Even the door camera doesn't really have to use a smart tv, though it probably does in that case.

First, you already live life at the whims of many other entities. Whether you use HomeKit or not, will most certainly not be the breaking point for your freedom.

Second, what relation does being under some level of control have to the value of life? For example, would an otherwise fulfilling life under a monarch be empty and meaningless?

I wish there was a way to detect "standard comments" and filter them out or put them in a different tab. It's not just this topic. Another example is the "I quit X and couldn't be happier" we see in every thread about Big Tech, regardless of the content of the article.

I understand that these comments resonate with a lot of people but when clicking a thread I expect to read comments about the actual topic (the new intrusive ads that LG just introduced), not generic comments about smart devices in general.

"A Panasonic TV gave your voice-search data to the police? Irrelevant! We're discussing a Mitsubishi smart-stove phoning the FBI because it detected you cooking Panda meat."

I wish these people would realize that the problem is smart devices in general and stop complaining that the tiniest of circumstances make an entirely new case.

I understand that this sort of emotional populism resonates with people: "lol, no - this case is totally different and you have to suck it!" but when I click on a headline I expect to see people engaging with the heart of the issue, not dodging and dissembling because they're offended by the implications.

----

Yeah, I get ya. It is annoying that people don't address the specific topic at hand, but you have to realize that the specific brand (LG) of the TV isn't the issue - companies blatantly invading our privacy is. If we get too distracted on which company is doing it this week we'll look up in a few years and realize we're arguing over whether Samsung or LG is sending our records to the government instead of fighting for a blanket users-rights bill and it'll be too late, both will be.

So far I've only got minor ads in the options screen and when switching inputs but if you guys roll over (or spend your efforts fighting other smart-device owners) then who knows.

That's kind of it, though. Nobody asked for ads. Of course it makes the manufacturer money, but also severely degrades the UX. I wonder how much higher demand would need to get for them to offer a shit-free experience for a bit more money.

I also wonder what kind of price sensitivity we are looking at when it comes to a 1,500 tv.

And if you think you'll put up with it just to avoid connecting the TV, your family members won't.

So I just blocked the ads via DNS. So far so good.

I have a Mac mini serving content to the (not dumb, but deaf, dumb and blind) TV.

Internet of "Things" indeed. John Carpenter, eat your heart out.

One of my TVs, a Samsung, will pop up a huge window complaining it doesn't have internet access, and it will keep it on screen until it gets internet access, which happens fairly quickly after my wife starts complaining. Ironically the thing it complains about is wanting to update it's antivirus, which is only needed because it is connected to the internet.

I will vote (and have) with my vallet next time, and that includes never buying Samsung again. I will also "try it out" in the shop before buying another brand.

Imagine the FBI knocking on your door.

Brave new world.

This may work until 5g (or a successor) rolls around and becomes cheap enough for iot devices to just embed a cell, so as to provide "a seamless experience" and to jam ads down our throats come hell or high water.

A bit of an aside but this T-Mobile thing too is really pissing me off. I’m fine with “if you don’t pay, you have to view ads”, but if I’m paying and still getting ads/tracking - not happy.

We need legislation and different technology options to capture this.

On the TV front - an enterprising young startup could make really nice looking TVs with guaranteed no ads and probably sell for at least double the price.

If you ever are tempted, there are still a few good dumb TVs out there. Admittedly they get less, so vote with your wallet!

> I don't want smart anything in my house. My lights are hardwired to a switch on the wall. My washer and drier need me to turn dials and push buttons and go ding when they're done. My fridge has no microprocessor in it.

I would update that to: "I don't want smart anything in my house [that isn't fully open source]." Obviously this is not great for the average person, but at least for a programmer I can review, test and improve these devices.

One thing I will never have in my home that is closed source is a camera or microphone. I want to know _exactly_ how this data is used and where it goes.

Please God no. The last thing I want to do after coming home from work is the same shit I was doing at work. I like the simplicity of shit just acting as expected.

I understand, but a side project feels different. I do it because I want to, not because I need to.

I own a LG 4K OLED TV, I put it in the same VLAN add above and block all requests to the internet. Instead I use an nvidia shield for streaming tv and movies.

One of the biggest IoT markets is large corporations with large workforces they would like to manage. A lattice of job-relevant IoT devices give them an automated layer to monitor and control. It lets them enhance safety, productivity, communication and motivation to their own likings. IE to their own profits. Usually at any personal expense or detriment on the part of their work force they can reasonably expect to get away with.

The solution will be someone building an upscale TV with no ads and no BS. TVs are just too cheap to not go down the adware path hardcore.

(May have to change your WiFi password as well.)

It's been a mostly positive experience. It even received an update within the last year. The update exchanged some old bugs for some new bugs, but for the most part it turns on and streams videos without much fuss. It's the first TV I've owned that correctly sequences my audio receiver's power over HDMI, and successfully passes through the TV remote's playback controls to the blu-ray player.

The most frustrating thing about it is that there's apparently a defect in its hardware accelerated video decoder. When Netflix came out with their fancier compression codecs last year, 4k shows started completely glitching out. Folk were complaining about it on reddit for months. Luckily I have a friend who works at Netflix who was able to start busting some skulls and get it patched over. For now...

I figure I've got at least another year or two before the built-in Android functionality is obsolete to the point of being inconvenient, or the streaming apps stop coping with the buggy video decoder. Since the TV works pretty well as a monitor, though, I should be able to just hook up a more modern external Android TV device and keep going with a roughly similar experience. I'm hopeful that it will even continue to seamlessly power on and off.

My other TV is a "dumb" 1080p Samsung plasma screen I bought second hand in 2010 from a particularly sketchy dude on Craigslist. It's still going strong, other than some occasional power supply buzzing and perhaps a bit of phosphor fade. It's travelled across the country and even survived a bachelor party camping trip. Honestly though, it's more of a pain to use than the Android TV, even as a dumb monitor.

Turning all the lights out when I'm finally comfy in bed is nice. Turning the string of Christmas lights on the lanai on, which don't have a switch indoors or anywhere near the door, is nice.

Being able to ask for an album or genre to play and having it happen: nice! Having a certain light turn on at sunset: nice.

None of these things were broken before, but they weren't as nice. It isn't garbage.

Although having it reset during a 3 am power outage, resulting in lights turning on in my formerly dark bedroom: not as nice! Still a few bugs in the system...

Network monitoring allows my solar array to be remotely monitored for faults & diagnosed. Network access allows my sprinkler controller to track the weather for more accurate water usage modeling...

Ordinary light switches and light bulbs are great. But some things stand to benefit from smarts.

The screen is (was) covered in ads for TV programs and movies. Fortunately I was able to turn all that off but the home screen is designed around ads so without them it looks clunky. (unlike say Apple TV which just shows the apps)

A few times in the last 4 years it has crashed and rebooted in the middle of watching something (that process takes 1-2 mins? Just timed a reboot, 1 min 20 seconds but crashes take longer)

I hoping to get something dumb next time I get a TV. Unfortunately dumb TV generally seem more expensive. Like I have to by a business display TV and are often missing features (like no lag, no interpolation modes)

Shelves of VHS haven't broke and don't need fixing!

I regret having friends suffer through that quality to watch things like the last season of Game of Thrones just because I liked hosting. I had friends with better TVs that didn't say anything because I liked having people over and they didn't.

I've never connected it to the internet and glad I haven't but there really is a night and day difference in quality. I've slowly upgraded my parent's TVs and they have really appreciated it.