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Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

arstechnica.com

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Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#151

Post by Semaphor »

zelly wrote: post #46

We are all used to SaaS randomly getting obsoleted, but when you buy a physical device you kind of expect to own it forever. But no, cloud and IoT means even your physical stuff are SaaS products. Just stop buying the trash.

All my smart home devices (excluding Alexa, one day I'll get around to setting up snips.ai, but for now at least it's only an extra interface and nothing I depend on) will keep working without internet – without a problem. The problem is with the always-on things. It's the same with computer games. But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#152

Post by woohoo7676 »

I bought two nest outdoor Cameras on the general recommendation that they were the best all around for the job. I have them hooked up to my home automation system so that they sync away statuses - now this is pretty much kaput.

How much would it possibly cost for Google to just keep the Works with Nest Apis on maintenance mode? I personally will never buy another Nest (or I guess Google Nest) product since apparently this is how they are treating folks.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#153

Post by dustinmoris »

optymizer wrote: post #141
dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

I, for one, am enjoying my 'smart home' setup, where I can say "Alexa, turn off the TV", "Alexa, turn on Chromecast" and "Alexa, set the bedroom temperature to 72", regardless of which floor of the house I'm on. I'd rather fiddle with updates and setup once in a while (I have never had to reconfigure the devices in 2 years), than look for that goddamn remote between couch cushions, press the power button and possibly…

> I would hate to make that trip downstairs, annoyed and grumpy.

My grandma always said "What you don't have in your head you must have in your legs".

My calculation is simple: Where do I expect to waste more time in my life? Periodically configuring/updating smart home devices, getting to the bottom of issues if something doesn't work as expected, or once in a while walk the stairs an extra time because I left the TV on.

So far I don't forget to switch off my TV often enough to justify the human effort of smart home devices. Maybe one day when I become older and more forgetful and not turning of TVs and lamps becomes a habit then I might re-evaluate my decision.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#154

Post by Semaphor »

slantyyz wrote: post #77
erinnh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For lightning I use the Ikea Tradfri brand, but afaik Philips Hue also works. (as do most ZigBee products with various bridges) The management solution in my home is OpenHab2, but Home Assistant also works fine. https://www.home-assistant.io/components/ https://www.openhab.org/addons/ There are a few other products I use (for blinds, windows, heat), but you can often simply search the above two lists and read through…

Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant, and it's free for OpenHAB. I personally prefer OpenHAB over HomeAssistant, but the thing that annoys me about OpenHAB2 is that it doesn't have even rudimentary built in user management with authentication. The docs basically tell you to use something like Nginx to do that for you.

> Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant

if you want a super simple setup, they have manual guides for setting it up. And if you just want remote access and don't need Alexa/Google integration, it almost as simple manually.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#155

Post by mschuster91 »

gambiting wrote: post #150
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a 100k cinema room ... I would ask myself some hard questions about my priorities in life.

It's a sort of thing that you build when money is meaningless. And at that point you can still have very valid priorities - helping other people out, setting up charities, etc etc. Your house just happens to have a cinema room - it's no different "luxury" than having underfloor heating in your bathroom. It's comparably unnecessary, just on a different financial scale.

> it's no different "luxury" than having underfloor heating in your bathroom. It's comparably unnecessary, just on a different financial scale.

Underfloor heating is not unnecessary, in fact it is about 10% more efficient in operating cost[1] as it can operate at lower inlet temperatures (30-35 °C, compared to 60+ °C for conventional radiators). In addition conventional radiators are often placed on the outside-facing wall below a window, which means that much of the generated heat gets lost.

As for the installation costs, for new construction conventional radiators and underfloor heating are approximately at the same price level.

[1]: https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/energie/id_73373816/fuss...

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#156

Post by rch »

hunter2_ wrote: post #96
rch wrote: post #86

> Google's smart home strategy will now revolve around only the "Works with Google Assistant" program This arguably makes more sense anyway, and I think it opens up some interesting possibilities that might not have been possible while Nest was a standalone entity.

Works With Nest means arbitrary third parties having API access to a Nest device. Any person could make a dev account and start logging data, sending commands, etc. Works With Google Assistant means Google (and in this case, only Google, given the WwN sunset) having API access to whatever device, in this case a Nest device. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm expecting that the extra context available in the Assistant platform will yield integrations that are generally more useful, even if there are fewer of them.

As for tinkering... it's not that difficult to build a smart thermostat these days.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#157

Post by Phenomenit »

hunter2_ wrote: post #116
dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

Lighting hardwired to a stuck system and touching physical controllers (phone or otherwise) as you describe is one possible setup. On the contrary, I just have some table/floor lamps with smart outlets between their plugs and the outlets that can be quickly removed in case of failure, and touching my phone is only in case of voice (Google Home Mini) failure. Neither of which fail often, like much less than once a yea…

Yeah, that's my approach as well, smart but with dumb fallback in case. Increases the WAF significantly.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#158

Post by fooqux »

dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

Everyone has different use cases. Some people just want to show a cool thing off to their friends, or even to prove they can do something at that scale. Silly? Perhaps, but who am I to judge their hobbies?

Personally, I do find things like HVAC automation nice. If I forget to turn the thermostat down when I leave for a trip, I can do so remotely and that is real savings. Everyone has their use cases though.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#159

Post by vbezhenar »

chomp wrote: post #133
dustinmoris wrote: post #97

Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…

I halfway agree with your comment. I think smart home technology is still in the realm of tinkerers right now, and investing in an ecosystem requires a lot of forethought. I replaced all of my dumb light switches with zwave light switches, but the nice thing is that they still act as light switches. I bought dumb IP cameras that can stream RTSP instead of going to someone's "cloud". I feed all of this into a homeassi…

So the answer for your friends would be "ask that company and buy their premium support package". And "that company" will ensure that tech industry bends to ordinary people needs. I don't know about you, but that's the way things work around me. Ordinary people don't know how to work on computer. They learned few buttons and sequence to push those buttons, but if they pushed caps lock, they instantly lost. So they call support and that guy comes to them and pushes caps lock, so they can continue to work. It could work with smart home exactly similar. Some company installing devices and maintains them. If you have a problem, you just call them and they'll help you.

Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

#160

Post by Kique »

Andrex wrote: post #95
Kique wrote: post #28

I kind of like how Google is moving all the home related products to the Nest brand. We always talk about Google branding being the worst but I think this is actually a logical move to one brand for everything Home. I also like that I'll be able to use my google login for my Nest products in the future, and the author even agrees that the Nest app is not great and the Google Home app is what I currently use anyway fo…

Yes, I agree. The brand consolidation is long overdue, as are any meaningful updates and fixes to the Nest app. Those are two definite positives of this move. Moving to Google Accounts is more murky: I can definitely see and sympathize with arguments on the basis of Google's overall business model and how it seems off for an ad company to be creating products for the home. With that said, Nest accounts (like the app)…

Agreed with everything you said, especially the "dumbing down" of the access to some of these devices.

The entire Cambridge Analytica/Facebook debacle was possible because users granted certain apps access to their data in the first place. And with the Works With Nest program we have users granting access to their cameras/smoke detectors/thermostats and just assuming/hoping that everything will be OK. Just a matter of time until something goes wrong and Google is better off scrapping the old way and creating something new with more security - even if it means losing certain features that were possible before.

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