"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.
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 household are setting alarms and turning lights on/off. In the next home, probably won't even bother.
I've totally disabled my entire smart home ecosystem. Philips hue thankfully has a hubless fallback (with the Zigbee remote). I just hate the unreliable nature of wireless devices, and having to manage an account for every accessory (Philips hue account, wemo account, iCloud account, etc.). Matter/thread which was supposed to be a smart home revolution turned out to be a crapshoot requiring proprietary Thread border routers.
Probably A/B testing but mine answers most questions these days, I swear even those it couldn't answer in the past. It hasn't given me the I don't know answer in a long while. Still mostly used for lights, morning alarms, shop opening hours, asking if my dog can eat my snack and the weather.
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.
There's also profiteering and security issues. Thermostat that wants to connect to "cloud" and needs to know my street address, my name etc.? -- Not happening. Companies selling "smart" devices instantly overcomplicated relatively simple appliances making them beyond DIY repair level, and, on top of it, wanted to sell service of supporting these overly complicated devices. It's just very hard to see the benefit, when all that eg. the thermostat does is turning the boiler on and off, saving a few seconds to someone who'd otherwise have to do it manually.
There also aren't that many areas where automation could possibly accomplish much. I think, the main directions are:
* Optimize energy usage (the same thermostat thing). It doesn't really amount to much. It could be useful in industrial setting, but for households it just doesn't save that much money, even if it works well.
* Cleaning. Making roombas deal with furniture or large objects left on the floor seems like mission impossible without a significant change in approach. Similarly for surfaces that are above the floor (desk, shelves etc.) Cleaning the exterior could be its own an quite an interesting thing though. Stuff like removing dead foliage from the roof for instance, or repainting the walls.
* Cooking. This could be potentially interesting, but will probably require a complete redesign of the tools used for cooking today to be reasonably priced. Eg. there would be no need for knives with handles for humans, because it's easier to make a slicing / chopping machine that has a very different configuration. Stoves and ovens would need to have some way of moving pots in and out automatically. Also, they'd probably have to be connected to the fridge and other kitchen storage... Which, in the end, means that it's not going to be an incremental upgrade. It will be also probably difficult to make the automated system coexist with human cooks...
> it just doesn't save that much money, even if it works well
You should see how wasteful typical American households are when they use a dumb thermometer. The best energy-saving feature is simply at-home vs away-from-home detection. I don't want my HVAC at home to run when I'm away at work or worse away at vacation, unless the temperature is really extreme. This easily saves me hundreds of dollars for a month-long vacation.
> Making roombas deal with furniture or large objects left on the floor seems like mission impossible
Roomba the company hasn't innovated in years. Switch to a different brand like Roborocks. Also don't choose models with a camera for privacy and performance reasons: lidar is much better.
High end robot vacuums have been innovating (including Roomba), with self-emptying bins and ML-based obstacle avoidance for things like cords and pet waste. This requires a camera, so any high end robot vacuum is going to have one. For me, those features are worth it.
The other big area of innovation is combo-vacuum+mop, including automatic water replacement and cleaning, but those features don’t seem to be fully ready for prime time yet. Roomba is behind the curve on this one.
ML-based obstacle avoidance does not require a camera. The latest products consciously avoid cameras to assuage fears that the images captured could be sent to the cloud.
It may not require a camera, but in practice I think most or all units use them. It’s definitely not a Roomba-specific issue.
I’m familiar with the “woman on a toilet” story and I think it’s overblown. It was a prototype unit used for training the ML model, not a consumer unit.
This is why it’s requirement that all “smart” devices in my house can fall back to “dumb” use. Smart switches are the way forward here. They work just the same as existing switches, but I can also control them via automation, voice, or an app.
I normally recommend people start their home automation journey with smart bulbs, ideally in their bedroom so they can speak their lights off and on while in bed, but long-term, switches are the best.
> 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.
Exactly this.
I've had so many "aw fuck it I'll do it myself" moments with tech.
I no longer use any smart home devices. It was a passing fad as far as my experience goes.
As another commenter alluded to, good Smarthome tech becomes an appliance, which isn’t a desirable high margin business, and bad tech becomes a nuisance which is also not a desirable business.
That’s why Google is slowly getting out of it and shifting their focus from Nest. That’s why Apple never did much beyond a few speakers, and it’s why Amazon is right at home in that business (but even they’re getting out of the money-losing voice assistant aspect).
Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming, but maybe I just lack the creativity and vision. Apple surely has some great tech left over from the car R&D so who knows. Apple is unfortunately not great at a “communal” perspective when making things.
I think a big issue no one talks about will be robot storage/garages. It’s already an issue for Roomba and anything bigger will be a no-go for many households. That is probably apples best chance - make it pleasant to look at and a status symbol.
> Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming, but maybe I just lack the creativity and vision.
SwitchBot is working on something I haven't seen elsewhere yet: Making robot vacuums double as mops is becoming common, and and a few have modifications to hook into the water/waste lines so you don't have to refill it, but SwitchBot made that as part of its primary design because they got the idea to use the robot to ferry water around other places: it can automatically refill their humidifier and empty their dehumidifier.
I could imagine further enhancements for watering plants, or maybe if it's a success a future one that cleans rugs may become feasible.
Oh absolutely, it just has the advantage of being a well know and relatively simple machine (the vacuum), that is expected to roll across the floor, and is expected to avoid household objects instead of interacting with them.
Almost all other tasks either operate at human-hands level (significantly bigger robot) or need intimate understanding of you and your home (eg picking things up off the floor) or need a ton of dexterity (folding clothes). Or all three.
I like smart devices for their automation potential. I use smart plugs to turn on and off lights, coffee makers, grow lights, heating mats. The ability to quickly program a plug to turn on every morning at 10am and turn off again at 10pm is valuable to me. It's even more valuable if you get into hobbies like aquarium keeping where you can automate lights and fish feeders.
Yes, you can do all of these things manually, but are you good at keeping a flawless schedule? It may not matter if you forget to turn on the coffee maker but it matters a lot if you forget to feed the fish. And you won't always be available to handle these things every single day, unless you work from home and follow an extremely rigid schedule.
I'm curious about the coffee maker bit. I drink espresso and I can't really imagine a benefit in turning something a device on if someone isn't there to also put coffee in it, pour it etc.
How much time does it save you having your coffee maker or before you go to get coffee?
I drink espresso as well. It takes 1/2 hour to warm up the machine after I turn it on. Having it turn on and be ready for me when I want to make a coffee saves 1/2 hour. Plus I have time-of-use billing for electricity so having it turn on early in the morning during off-peak hours saves money! It takes more energy to heat the thing up to operating temperature than it does to maintain that temperature all day.
Only if you're feeding once a day. You often want to feed 2 or even 3 times a day with a smaller amount at each feeding time. This tends to lead to less wasted food.
You feed fish during the day when the light is on. If you feed them 3 times a day and the light is on for a 12 hour period, that’s once every 4 hours 3 times followed by 12 hours of rest. What analog timer can do that?
That’s not going to work if you’re going on a vacation for a week. You want to fill the feeder with a week’s worth of food at a time and have it feed every day according to the schedule. Control the power to the feeder with a smart plug and set the feeder’s internal timer to 4 hours.
I have a Roomba, it works pretty well for doing 'maintenance level' vacuuming--keeping the level of cat hair to a manageable level, etc. For the most part, robot vacuums have succeeded in becoming boring, which is what I really want in an appliance.
I'm trying to update to v2 of HomeKit in the Home app but it won't let me unless I login to iCloud. From what I recall v2 of HomeKit relies on a hub spoke model, as opposed to v1 which relies more on broadcast packets.
> ”“Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board,… 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.
I think it's that most actually useful smart home stuff was very quickly saturated. It is great to be able to adjust my lights easily. It is great to turn my TV off in the other room. It is great to have a robot vacuum.
But a smart coffee maker? A smart clock? A smart dishwasher? All this garbage ended up being gimmicks and it ran out of steam so quickly.
I hope the things that are useful continue to get support as the big players abandon smart home expansion.
I really do want smart home devices! My biggest issue so far has been stability and interoperability issues between each vendor and system. Those things have gotten better, but are still a headache. Apple is in a pretty good position to solve those pain points (at the cost of buying new devices (Apple brand or Apple Certified maybe?). Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...
> Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...
This is the answer.
HomeAssistant is fantastic and has unified everything of mine into a single platform. Control mostly happens through Google and Apple/Homekit devices (other than hardware switches), and everything works pretty seamlessly.
I thought I would be into smart home devices, but the companies fucked up by turning them into privacy and security liabilities, with poor interoperability and likelihood of turning into junk when the company goes under.
From what I hear, it's a nightmare to get Siri to know what light you want to turn on. Unfortunately it seems like apple is trailing the pack in the smart home area.
I have the feeling that basically all current smart home products are either a disappointment in their limitations or useful but really time consuming.
The only smart appliances I got are Philips hue lights which are nice but well, after the initial discovery, I use them as classical light bulbs 99% of the time. I’ve found zero useful automation (not saying they don’t exists) and I can’t see why I would control lighting from my phone (at least not enough to justify spending hundreds into smart bulbs and smart switches).
Ultimately, I’m not against smart home but since each home is unique, by definition, those objects are only useful if the user is willing to invest enough time to tailor the configuration to be useful in his own unique house.
Oh I thought about ranting about my experience with Sonos speakers which are really nice speakers with great audio quality for the money and size and everything you’d want except the "smart" part you are forced to use with their terrible (and closed) software.
