Why the smart home bubble popped

tempestn

I expect the more significant concern would be OpenClaw opening your front door for someone else.

AnotherGoodName

The 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.

AnonEM00se

I 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.

rolph

smart 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

People tried to monetize it too early.

anonymousiam

Perhaps 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.

phoronixrly

Was this whole article just a set-up for that punchline??

grebc

I 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

The 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.

rebuilder

I 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.

quadrifoliate

The 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.

protocolture

What bubble? What pop? This feels like "I am not seeing ads anymore therefore it doesnt exist"

Animats

Most 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

Great 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

The value prop is just really really low.

recursivecaveat

Smart 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.