alt Hacker News90% of smart devices are for novelty, or for you to spend more time setting up and maintaining their automations than they save you in being automated.
But that 10% is magic. A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room, but in a workshop setting - especially a shared workshop setting? Awesome. Just awesome.
A well defined use case, in the right setting, and smart stuff can be genuinely very useful. Usually that’s not how they’re used - i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.
> A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room,
Why wouldn't that be useful? People be surprised how poor their air quality generally are inside, unless they already measure it, making it better sounds useful in oh so many ways.
> i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.
What are those things? I have about 70-80 "smart things" by now, but every single one is genuinely useful, otherwise I wouldn't install them in the first place. Lots of open/closed sensors, soil moisture, temperature+pm2.5 sensors, water taps and so on.