51–60 of 162 posts
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I would pay like $5000 for a laundry folding robot. I just want a big washing-machine sized box where I dump my laundry at the top and slowly everything gets folded. That's 1 hour / week freed up.
You could get yourself a drying cabinet (basically a closet with an A/C inside).
"Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board, from smart speakers to the Roomba. It would be great if Apple changed that, but I'm not optimistic. I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.
Or are these devices just so common, unremarkable, and ubiquitous now that you just aren’t noticing them anymore? I can’t think of any of my friends and family who don’t at least have some smart speakers and smart lighting devices in their home.
Smart door locks that you can open with your phone, and smart door bells and security cameras that you can monitor remotely are becoming pretty common too.
They should just fix Siri and iTunes. Siri is shockingly useless. If Siri were even a little more useful I would get a Home Pod but it's utterly useless for most things except setting timers and turning on lights.
They need some actual management talent, evidently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEwrSSFe9s
Here's what I used:
Raspberry Pi Model 4 B
Raspberry Pi CPU
Raspberry Pi CPU heatsink (w/self-adhesive)
Raspberry Pi manual
Raspberry Pi A/C adapter
Raspberry Pi case
ConBee II Zigbee USB gateway
USB ADATA Micro SD card reader
USB cable
Micro SD card (for operating system and Home Assistant)
Ethernet cable (probably not needed because the Pi 4 has onboard WiFi)
I haven't tried running a local text-to-speech engine backed by an LLM to control Home Assistant (HA). Maybe someone is working on this already?
TTS: https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper
LLM: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/releases
LLM: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-D...
HA: https://www.home-assistant.io/
It would take some tweaking to get the voice commands working correctly.
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I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Can anyone think of anything? I would guess any new product would be more complex, less efficient, and a security risk. It'll be cool and trendy for a few months and then die off. Just like the Alexa and Google speakers that can tell you the weather or adjust your lights...is it REALLY that useful outside of entertaining your nieces and neph…
The company that builds a robot that can do household chores will be very, very rich. I want a bot that can do laundry (load washer, load dryer, fold, put away), do the dishes (rinse, put in dishwasher, put clean dishes away, wash pots & pans), vacuum floors, dust, clean up messes, empty garbage bins, take out the trash, mow my lawn, trim bushes, clean tables, mop floors, make meals, cleans toilets and sinks and bath…
A robot that does it for me that I can buy for $15k and last a decade? Id be all over it.
The security camera, door lock, and thermostat space has room for improvement. The annual subscription model for cameras combined with their privacy gaps opens a space for Apple. My car unlocks when I walk up to it. Shouldn't my house do the same?
Kitchen appliances have gone done in quality to the point that they are replaced every few years when the linear motors fail. I don't know if there is enough margin for Apple but knowing what food is cycling through the kitchen would be another interesting health input.
3D printer, laser cutter, replicator machine that manufactures physical goods in your house.
Automatic pool/hot tub system that keeps chemical levels balanced and orders supplies as needed.
Urban gardening pods that allow anyone to grow healthy food at home.
> Near its campus in Cupertino, California, Apple has a secret facility that resembles the inside of a house — a site where it can test future devices and initiatives for the home. Apple has a condo in Cupertino?
There are a bunch of things in a house that are time consuming that would benefit from the help of robots. In fact it’s all the things that rich people can afford to hire someone to do: - cooking - cleaning - taking care of kids You can be sure that a ton of people are working on those.
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I think the issue is that smart home devices didn't do anything I couldn't already do, but a physical switch is faster than arguing with the computer. Hey Google, can you turn off the baby bedroom light? I'm sorry, I don't know that device.
I used to have a dozen or so Google Home devices for all sort of automation, but have mostly given up on it. I feel like Google is going to kill these any day now, the Google Assistant on them has been getting dumber and dumber. Where in the past, it would do its best to provide an answer, now for 99% of queries it just says "idk how to help with that." So the only thing these devices are used for these days in my ho…
I know others here saying they can do it themselves but nothing beats asking google to turn off the lights in the house when I've forgotten and I'm cosy in bed already.
I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only picking areas that weren't successful for a reason, like insurmountable technical difficulties or lack of customer interest, and no amount of Apple's design or marketing magic can fix that. See – self driving, AR/VR, smart speakers, folding phones, now home rob…
Spatial Computing/iVision is, for example, a claim in vr. It gives them some exposure to the market, some ability to extend & integrate their existing application/computing ecosystem into this medium. Ditto for all the other pieces; they're all integrative. Smart speakers work with airplay. iWatch works with iPhone works with iOS. The close integration lets them rebuff innovation in any other field: no one small can come along and build the next VR headset or the best watch to compete with Apple in any of these sectors, because no one can integrate like Apple. No one else has all the products. You have to have complete over the horizon horizontal control to keep your intense market power, and Apple is invested above all in there never being a chink in that armor, in making sure they can completely dictate the shape of all products by producing & owning all the products themselves. This is Apple.
Hence, Apple has to dabble everywhere. It maintains the most, it prevents real competition from forming, and it earns them a couple % revenue here and there to boot.
Expressing an entirely different brand of cynicism, I'd also ask: where else could Apple look to expand into? None of these sectors has been a runaway success. But it's not like Apple's missing the boat on some massive new tech that a huge new Total Addressable Market. It's been absent from Crypto and AI but generally it's just expanding wherever there's any opportunity, and why not when you have the cash & when any sector could become huge?