What happens when your smart device is 7-15+yrs old and isnt supported by anything anymore?
I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
281–290 of 356 posts
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…
> physical things last a long time There's a lot of survivor bias here. I have had plenty of dumb physical things fail in what seems like unreasonably short times. But I do have done physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old. I do not interpret that to mean that everything from that era / factory / manufacturer lasts 100 years, just that all of the surviving items did.
> physical dumb devices
Physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old are usually made out of pretty durable, but individually replaceable parts. Thus they get fixed if they do break. The mechanisms are usually pretty easy to figure out, so you can spot if a spring is broken, a bolt is loose, a thing stopped turning, etc.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…
Same here, but I want to say some bad things about old thermostats. My first house had propane heating, in a big tank that they would periodically come by and fill, so I had a visceral connection to how much fuel I was using. The previous owner had left the original 1960s mercury thermostats running the place, which meant that barring any initiative on my end the temperature was the same no matter if I was sleeping,…
Setback thermostats were invented a century ago — not digital.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#284I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at. I have some similar examples to the ones in the article. I recommended that my brother-in-law get a Google wifi AP some years ago. Recently, I got an email from Google saying that they are no longer supporting it and after a certain date you will no longer be able to make changes to it. WTF?!? My Apple Airport Extreme is older than the Goog…
Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…
Here's a scenario. I own one of these new-fangled wifi thermostats. The developers frequently update the firmware remotely. There is no way to disable this 'feature' that I know of.
Let's say the update fails catastrophically (loses power during flashing etc) and the device is bricked. I'm not home, it's dead of winter, pipes freeze, burst, and flood my home. Far fetched? Maybe, maybe not. Who is liable for this? I'm sure the "click to agree" EULA when the thermostat boots up absolves them of responsibility.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…
> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are - unnecessarily complicated - privacy destroying - overpriced - vendor lock-in - often infected with online ads you can't get rid of - likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" devic…
Adding to this, I just don't see the use case for "smart" devices. The difference between me getting up and checking the thermometer vs checking the thermometer using my phone is 10 seconds, max.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Against googles lawyers? It would require a massive amount of pissed off consumers, and a huge team to even drag them to court. End result would be google paying a pittance and no one getting anything. End of the day, a lot of lawyers would be paid well and google would shrug it off as a cost of business.
With all this talk of ChatGPT clearing law school exams and all, I'd love to see a legal fight of lawyers armed with AI against "googles lawyers". I believe that'd be a net good. For everyone else in tech, I suppose we can all vow to never purchase Google products as gifts for family.
They cleared the exams, with barely passing scores though. In law, you can't paraphrase much - nuances in the law is everything when you're against the best lawyers that these tech giants would hire.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…
> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are - unnecessarily complicated - privacy destroying - overpriced - vendor lock-in - often infected with online ads you can't get rid of - likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" devic…
I used to feel this way, but don't anymore. Smart devices don't all go out to the cloud; you can easily build a completely-local smart home that nobody on the Internet can control or monitor. This is the default in Apple's ecosystem (though they integrate with cloud services if you want), and you don't even have to use a major tech company's ecosystem. You can install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and build your own local-only accessories with ESPHome and similar.
I find a mix of DIY and premade devices to be pretty good. I have all of my lights on Lutron Caseta (completely local, works when Internet is down) and can control them from my workstation, the wall, physical remotes, Apple devices, and Siri. I have Home Assistant bridged to Home Assistant, so can do things like control my workstation's LEDs from the Home app or Siri. Home Assistant has kind of interesting integrations, like something that reads the humidity sensor in my bathroom and the outdoor humidity to suggest how long the window needs to be opened to properly ventilate it after a shower.
I think the smart home is pretty OK. It gives you a single pane of glass to control all controllable devices, which ends up being quite worthwhile. (On a video call and need more light? Just switch them on from your computer. Too cold? Turn down the AC. No corporate tracking, just convenience.)
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still want profanity mode. Hurling insults at a Google Assistant and having to roast me in return would be amazing.
It should not respond like with "don't talk to me like that". It is a device, not a person, it has no feelings, and it is being used in a private home. No reason to police speech there.
Yeah it really rubs me wrong that smart devices do this. I OWN it. This isn’t a person. It’s a fucking computer and I don’t need lectures on language I use in my own home on my own devices. I’ll speak to my property however I want
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preface: I’m an iPhone user, but I’m kinda confused what you’re trying to achieve that can’t be had with just pressing the physical button the phone to turn off the screen. Does the screen need to be on for the alarm to work?
To clarify: the issue is that the screen stays illuminated when charging on the stand. Pressing the physical button used to work, even with the current oddball settings. It only stopped being effective a few weeks ago, when using a wireless charging stand. It still works when I switch back to USB charging. Presumably because it would be too easy to simply place the phone face down, effectively revealing user preferen…
I wonder if you're looking for the Settings -> Display -> Screen Saver function. Have you tried disabling it?
When enabled, it seems to have two options to either enable "when charging" or "when docked and charging". I wonder if your wireless charger is considered a dock and hence activates this different mode than you get for regular USB charging.
Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.…
Not allowing good search within a channel is the most ridiculous. They're a search company. How is that self-consistent? Especially when you know they have the data and index, but are simply using it for advertising.
They are a search company, yet they decided to give the same name to two completely different web frameworks. Ok one is called AngularJS and the other one is Angular, but still.