I have wasted so much time configuring smart home junk...honestly the parent post reads like its mocking my experience with this stuff.
My apartment is a patchwork quilt of perpetually out of date devices each with their own utterly garbage app (or underwhelming homekit integration, or arcane homeassistant yaml incantation if I’m feeling really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!
> 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.
I think a dumb TV with an external device is always better and hit this same path with relatives.
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.
The only investment I've found that's actually worth it is a home entertainment network like plex. Having all my family videos available in every room and every device connected to my Wi-Fi with a few clicks or a link and a shared user account has been worth the dozens of hours I've spent building my library, rebuilding my home server, upgrading components, managing updates, and debugging edge cases. Would I like lights to turn on and off when I enter and exit rooms? Yeah, but smart switches don't cover all of my use cases naturally and without manual overrides and the convenience isn't worth the thousands of dollars to retrofit my house for an immature technology.
"Our smart light switches are equipped with PersonalCoach™. PersonalCoach™ is an interactive exercise experience using the latest technologies to alter the user's environment in order to make exercise fun and seamlessly integrated into daily life."
I don't use a smart home system from a company, just my own scripts for different systems and to glue them together. Was it worth my time? No, not at all, but it was a good excuse to play with languages I wasn't familiar with and learn some new things.
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.
