Why the Smart Home Bubble Popped

The smart home is a thousand small problems to solve and should never be one catch all.

The automatic cat feeder works well. So does the roomba. I like my automated blinds but will stick with manual light switches. I consolidated my home theatre remotes. Note how they’re all seperate problems.

The smart home is here. It’s just that it was never a use case for a singular smart home platform. It was always 1000 seperate problems to solve that in no way ever belonged together and the experience was always worse when trying to combine it.

The smartest thing is having a light switch you walk over to. Doesn’t fail randomly, doesn’t need an internet connection to operate, doesn’t stop working when your internet is down.

My garage remote is in a PIN number lock box next to the garage. Open lock box, press remote, close lock box.

That’s smart.

Perhaps it popped because of devices from Google, Amazon, Apple, Sonos, etc. that surveil everything you say in their presence. My houses are fairly automated, but I have excluded any device with a microphone.

I was going to say I feel like my smart home technology is working great.

Then I remembered that I have to make shortcuts to bridge two products, it fails half the time, my ikea bridge has to be restarted every 30 minutes, and my smart garage door opener takes 30 seconds to respond now.

So on second thought, yeah, this all sucks.

I don’t know why you’d want to over pay on basic widgets that are really just glorified timers, not to mention are likely just full of security issues waiting to happen.

I expect the more significant concern would be OpenClaw opening your front door for someone else.

Was this whole article just a set-up for that punchline??

People tried to monetize it too early.

smart devices dont play well.

arguing with an AI that is intentionaly obtuse, is not what anyone wants when its time to try enjoying your home. noone needs to have a conversation with thier lightswitch, its for turning light on or off not pretending to be your pal and trying to exploit emotional reflexes.

i have a broken record for this, "stop wasting time and effort trying to pretend to be human, and get to work building something that does what its told to do."

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