31–40 of 122 posts
This annoys me greatly. When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local. I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control. And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution. I hadn’t p…
Don't buy connected stuff is a lesson people still need to learn
Connected stuff is fine, but who owns the connection matters.
Basically no one is going to run a business for the sake of customers or brand goodwill because, in the real world, there are no regulations or motivations to do so because "everything is a scam" is the normalized deviancy.
Take even a boring other industry, say single phase motor start and run capacitors. In the US, 3 of the 4 major original manufacturers of said products are owned by private equity and manufacture under under an array of cannibalistic turtles that M&A'ed basically every manufacturer. The net result is increased prices and shorter product life.
This annoys me greatly. When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local. I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control. And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution. I hadn’t p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Connected stuff is fine, but who owns the connection matters.
Private equity will buy anything and everything even moderately profitable using LBOs, stick them with the loans, take out more loans to pay themselves, spin them off, and wind them down. Basically no one is going to run a business for the sake of customers or brand goodwill because, in the real world, there are no regulations or motivations to do so because "everything is a scam" is the normalized deviancy. Take eve…
China would probably just imprison the people responsible for things like this
Sadly, I have no hope of anything to come out of that, not that the current admin really changed anything about that hope either.
This sort of shutdown should, immediately, with the full force of the law, mandate a release of a working version of the software and a working firmware update to switch it to that version of the software, that is licensed MIT or BSD, with full source code, that allows one to build the app themselves and keep using it as it was.
If you don't wanna keep rolling with it, fine, go ahead and move off of it. But this enshittified rug pull is infuriating and it cannot be allowed to continue this way. Absolute scummy behavior. Just fucking open source it, assholes.
> "After more than a decade of service .... users can no longer open/close or manage their door lock via the mobile app or web portal." Wow, a whole ten years for a door lock. Kind of like wemo's recent abandonment/EOL of their plugs... a big company like belkin can't keep an on/off switch working?
I’m sure a few people didn’t have trouble but the Wemo support forum and Reddit were justifiably full of anger at the products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends. According to the link this lock was supported for over ten years, and the landscape for this type of device was pretty Wild West back then. There are a lot of devices that never even got that much support. Today, give me any HomeKit supported device and I’m satisfied it will work for as long as I need it to without some dodgy 3rd party app siphoning my data. And let’s be honest, if you were buying fridges…
> And let’s be honest, if you were buying fridges or washing machines based on WiFi features that’s on you. I don't understand what you mean by this? My clothes will smell really bad if I leave them in the washer wet. If the appliance has a leak, I need to be nearby to remediate. Thus its not safe for me to start the appliance before I leave for 8+ hours. If I can remotely start my washing machine, just prior to me a…
I honestly think mandatory local support for HomeKit standard is one of the best designs. I lost internet despite having power due to a city wide outage. Having HomeKit still work for smart lights and outlet + home assistant was awesome. Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.
How so, should Apple ever decide they'll remove it from tvOS/HomepodOS?
And frankly, having to use Homekit for automations (or using it at all) is - compared to Home Assistant - frustrating, especially given their more or less unlimited resources.
And don't even get me started on Siri - compared to what it was when it started on the iPhone 4s i don't feel it made like any progress, at all. Having updated to iOS 26 a few days ago - congratulations, Siri is now failing 100% to "turn off bedside lamp" which worked fine on 18.x and ever before.
No, i don't think Apple is going to keep Homekit's lights on (heh) indefinitely - and wouldn't bet the farm (or house) on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private equity will buy anything and everything even moderately profitable using LBOs, stick them with the loans, take out more loans to pay themselves, spin them off, and wind them down. Basically no one is going to run a business for the sake of customers or brand goodwill because, in the real world, there are no regulations or motivations to do so because "everything is a scam" is the normalized deviancy. Take eve…
> stick them with the loans, take out more loans to pay themselves, spin them off, and wind them down China would probably just imprison the people responsible for things like this