My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don’t.
It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible.
I’m no Luddite. I run a software company! I see the allure of high-tech gadgets and have fallen for their promises before. When my wife and I built a house more than a decade ago, we opted for all kinds of automated systems: low-voltage controls, mechanized blinds, irrigation systems that measure rain so the sprinklers come on only when you need them. We regretted it almost immediately. What we discovered is that this stuff requires setup, which can take more time than just doing things manually, and is maddeningly glitchy, forcing you to pay someone handsomely by the visit or the hour to fix your appliances for you.
Tech makes many things better, but you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house. You shouldn’t need a tech tour and an app (or five) to turn the heat down or clean the dishes. You shouldn’t have to worry that pressing the wrong button will set off a chain of events you don’t know how to undo. All these powerful processors and thousands of lines of code have succeeded in making everyday things slower, harder to use, and less reliable than they used to be.
First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:
The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.
And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.
The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.
Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:
Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:
Great Commentary. This article really gives some “old man yells at cloud” energy
The older I get, the more I relate to yelling at clouds.
Smart Home technology is going to remain in its infancy because nobody is trying to improve it.
They know they don’t make money off of selling light bulbs that just work. They make money off of holding your eyesight hostage until you sign all your personal data over to their datacenters.