Note to self: never buy a Google device.
I bought my Nest before they were owned by Google...
Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
81–90 of 325 posts
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#82>1 points by tomc1985 10 days ago | parent | on: OneDrive reduces free tier from 15GB to 5GB
>Never trust the cloud, it will always stab you in the back... eventually
Posted this before, got downvoted...
...posting this again, and will probably get downvoted again...
Seriously people, suck it up and run your own shit if it matters at all
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#83I think what users actually need is a smart home computer: one device, for the entire family, which provides sits on the Internet and provides secure access to home-network devices (e.g. security cameras, media players) and which gives easier-to-use (albeit perhaps less-secure) access to those things on the LAN. It could use containers to run blobs of code from different vendors. Given modern computing resources, it…
Agreed. In fact, there is overlap in what you've just described and what I call "Personal Application Omnipresence," [1] a model of computing where applications run to service you (and your family) but are made available to all of your IO devices (phones, tablets, desktop terminals).
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#84I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion, was astonishing to me. I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge succe…
counter point: i pre-ordered dropcam for the reason that it was limited to cloud-use only. I wanted something dead simple to use so my wife / house sitter / etc could easily move it as needed, we had access anywhere without configuration, and devops/it being handled by someone else incase i'm not around. Classifying their cloud-only product design decision as "incredible arrogance" quite a stretch... if anything, sou…
Ubiquiti just came out with cameras and a DVR device (atom-based) to store the content with you: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#85Very cutesy title, but a very poor title. This is why I refuse to buy any 3rd party internet connected (I mean connects to a 3rd party, not just TCP/IP) appliance unless I can install anything I want on it. It doesn't matter if internet connectivity is required or optional - if I'm not in charge of the software on it, and it connects to a 3rd party I refuse to buy it. I have a feeling more and more people will refuse…
I think your refusal is fine (in practice), but if everyone thought this way, Nest wouldn't exist.
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#86I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion, was astonishing to me. I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge succe…
It seems like the complexity of getting around NAT/firewalls is likely to stymie a lot of potential users. Making a cloud service is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but it simplifies this important aspect of getting the device up and running.
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#87Very cutesy title, but a very poor title. This is why I refuse to buy any 3rd party internet connected (I mean connects to a 3rd party, not just TCP/IP) appliance unless I can install anything I want on it. It doesn't matter if internet connectivity is required or optional - if I'm not in charge of the software on it, and it connects to a 3rd party I refuse to buy it. I have a feeling more and more people will refuse…
Nice for you to say as a developer, but not every customer cares about this. I mean of course one should be able to flash new firmware. But more importantly people like Google shouldn't brick devices the customer has bought, whether they can be flashed with a new / alt firmware or not.
I think most customers that don't care about it are simple lacking the information to correctly assess the impact of it. I think accurately explaining a few of the possible downsides:
- If your internet if not functioning, the device may or may not function
- If the company that sold it to you closes, it may immediately stop functioning
- If the company that sold it to you decides to discontinue the product, it may stop functioning
- The company that sold it to you may remove or break functionality at any time. It may be left in this state for many reasons.
And then pointing to concrete examples of products where each of these cases happened, which shouldn't be that hard to do, and how long it took to happen in each case (from initial product launch and from last device sold), would result in a lot of people caring about exactly this problem.
In other words, I don't think it's that people don't care, it's that they don't know enough to know they care. It's a relatively new development, compared to items like cars, fridges and dishwashers, which is probably how a lot of people think about their appliance devices.
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#88Companies are getting more and more creative with interpreting what 'ownership' actually means. Books you've bought evaporate, equipment stops working, cars that can't be serviced other than at authorized dealerships and so on. Ownership is a term that has been stretched way beyond the breaking point.
Any device that needs an internet connection in order to function should be leased, not bought.
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#89Very cutesy title, but a very poor title. This is why I refuse to buy any 3rd party internet connected (I mean connects to a 3rd party, not just TCP/IP) appliance unless I can install anything I want on it. It doesn't matter if internet connectivity is required or optional - if I'm not in charge of the software on it, and it connects to a 3rd party I refuse to buy it. I have a feeling more and more people will refuse…
Nice for you to say as a developer, but not every customer cares about this. I mean of course one should be able to flash new firmware. But more importantly people like Google shouldn't brick devices the customer has bought, whether they can be flashed with a new / alt firmware or not.
It won't take many stories like this for the general public to be soured on any device that "connect to the cloud".
Right now saying that is positive advertising - it won't take much for that to be a negative when people are deciding what to buy.
Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
#90Google basically paid a billion dollars to Tony Fadell to get him to come to Google.
I wonder how they feel about that "investment" now.