161–170 of 378 posts
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…
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How sustainable? There are only three ways to sell a thermostat. - at the time a home is being built when it’s easy to get all sorts of add ons bundle through the builder. How many homes are being built in a year? - as a self service after market upgrade to your existing thermostat. In the grand scheme of things, how many people are willing to do that? -working with service companies or building out a network of inst…
Plenty of thermostats are sold per year. Certainly enough to sustain the many existing vendors. E.g. I'm in the UK. There are 25 million homes here and pretty much every home has a thermostat. If I assume that a thermostat lasts 20 years so that about 5% must be replaced in a given year that means a market of 1.25 million thermostats every year. Every DIY and plumbing supplies shop sells thermostats, so they must sel…
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Can't help but quote: «“the "Internet of Things" won't work until the "Local Area Network of Things" works», seen here on HN [1]. There's significantly less money in it, though, and more hassle. It's not going to become popular enough until people get burned enough with vendors going out of business, or just stopping support, and making their convenient $199 gadgets obsolete. In a sense, a large company like Nest pul…
LIFX bulbs work without the need to connect to the internet. They have a LAN protocol that's pretty easy to use.
LIFX looks nice though. The UDP Lan protocol is really neat, and the documentation is better than I remember of Philips Hue.
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.
Can't help but quote: «“the "Internet of Things" won't work until the "Local Area Network of Things" works», seen here on HN [1]. There's significantly less money in it, though, and more hassle. It's not going to become popular enough until people get burned enough with vendors going out of business, or just stopping support, and making their convenient $199 gadgets obsolete. In a sense, a large company like Nest pul…
I can see a half dozen solidly practical uses for a smart home setup, mostly scheduling tasks to be done while I'm sleeping or not at home. Beyond that, I'd have a lot of fun just building silly hobby projects with cheap sensors, wifi-controlled lighting, etc. But I'm not going to touch any of it until I can get a system that's happy to run locally, and only calls out to the rest of the world when it actually needs to. At this point, I'm even going to hold out for adaptable integrations; if some service I'm talking to shuts down, I should be able to substitute another one honoring the same API. Anything less looks like a privacy, security, and ownership nightmare.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of thermostats are sold per year. Certainly enough to sustain the many existing vendors. E.g. I'm in the UK. There are 25 million homes here and pretty much every home has a thermostat. If I assume that a thermostat lasts 20 years so that about 5% must be replaced in a given year that means a market of 1.25 million thermostats every year. Every DIY and plumbing supplies shop sells thermostats, so they must sel…
How many companies sustain entire businesses just based on selling thermostats? If Nest captured the entire market and sold $225 thermostats, that's less than a $300 million a year revenue in an entire year. That doesn't take into account wholesale prices. What does the net income look like?
As said the issue is that the aim always to exit. And also that they approach this as a Silicon Valley tech company and not as a "standard" company... So spending goes out of hands and it's a billion dollars or nothing.
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…
In the same way that dishwashers and washers/dryers have endured while other 70s smarter-home tech didn't [0], I would guess that some modern automations that actually provide value (e.g. robot vacuums) will continue on even as the hype dies down.
[0] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer
I can't think of a single compelling use-case for home automation systems. I'm trying to understand what other people see in it. I have to wonder if it's driven by the amount of interest a person has in "tinkering" with technology.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Home assistant
Thank you! It looks like a good start but certainly lacks some of the features and I'd of course expect a more user friendly version will eventually be introduced as it matures. Nice to see people are working on it!