alt Hacker NewsImo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.
Replies
The math I have always done is, "If I removed 100% of my issues with controlling my home appliances and I was absolutely sure it would only ever cost me, let's say, $1000, and it was never going to need maintenance and would never fail, how interested would I be?"
And the answer still keeps coming back, "not very". Not zero. But the problem is that there isn't a lot of value there to capture, so I'm not willing to pay all that much, especially when you consider the full cost-of-ownership of failure modes that they create. The daily annoyance of "flipping some light switches" just isn't that great.
That this industry keeps getting run by MBAs who keep calculating
1. Hey we can lock them in with these centralized services.
2. (A couple of years later) Hey we can make more money if we
shut down our old centralized services.
At least my smart phone, as much as we may all like to complain, brings a lot of value to me that can be leveraged for that sweet, sweet MBA-approved lockin. The smart home proposition never had anywhere near as much to leverage. And the smart phone world still is full of MBAs delusional enough to think that "storing the user's heartbeat information in the cloud" is somehow enough leverage to be worth a $9.95/month subscription to me.
> Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens
Question is - are these things good enough that restaurants actually use them? I would be surprised if they were.