alt Hacker NewsIt's ridiculous that people are jumping on the vendors bandwagon - control everything remotely, AI inside, etc.
Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
Sure, I understand that there are a lot of manufacturers today, and basically all products are similar, so marketing people are looking for any way to differentiate a product from a lot of others... but cloud-connected devices are a road to hell... hello LG, Samsung, Canon, Western Digital and others who change cloud solutions for hardware so often that you blow your nose and get a service cancellation message in the mail :)
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I’m afraid you’re mixing at least two different things together.
Possible reasons for wanting remote control of home systems while away from home is one thing.
Engineering home systems in a way that they depend (to some extent varying from case to case) on external computers is another thing.
I don’t think there’s any single answer to either of those, but there are a lot of possible reasons.
Personally, I had a use case where I ran a vacuum remotely. I was on a work trip, and thanks to a robot vacuum I returned back to a clean home. That was a convenient and desirable outcome. Others’ reasons may vary.
As for engineering, I imagine reasons must be complex, consisting of at least tradition, cost, state of home network connectivity, and current disparity between consumer and corporate interests.
> Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
One reason I can think of is I'd rather be able to remote control a device by pushing my instructions to the cloud from my phone and having my device pull from said cloud, rather than making the device itself accessible remotely.
Another is settings/data persistence (eg: if I replace the device, etc).
That said, I don't have a smart vacuum and none of my smart devices are devices I want to access when I'm not home, personally, so I'm not "for" cloud-based stuff anyway.