People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live …
They could not find a single light switch in the entire home.
The problem has nothing to do with a rejection of the tech. It has everything to do with vulture capitalism and regulatory failure. It’s the same reason why most average people haven’t committed to smart homes; nobody wants to use a dozen apps — a dozen walled gardens — to control their devices, lose manual control of core functionality, or commit to spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on a company or system that could be abandoned within years (or a products usable lifespan).
This is a prime example of corporate greed shooting itself in the foot. If an open standard like matter was established (and committed to) from the start (10-15 years ago), the industry would be hundreds/thousands of percent larger. Now it will be an uphill battle, as most people interested in the tech have been burned by the greed.
I think that both things are at play here - what you said about regulatory failure, and rejection of the tech. And they’re interconnected.
A more complex system (with more parts and/or more complex parts) will have more points of failure, and failures will be harder to fix. And while a lot of this additional complexity is caused by that greed that you’re talking about, some is intrinsic - for example if you want lights that turn on/off from a cell phone, you need some sensor in the lightbulb, that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and that sensor can and will break.
Sure, but if it wasn’t for vulture capitalism trying to cut every cent possible, it’d be a minor increase in cost to make these systems degrade gracefully. Then at worst it’d still function as the equivalent ‘dumb’ device.
Without capitalism the increase in cost would be smaller for sure, but depending on the item it would be still meaningful. For example, the dining table from the article still needs a hydraulic system to go up and down, that isn’t exactly cheap.
Instead I feel like the biggest harm of capitalism is shoving the tech even where it doesn’t make sense to have it, and then telling people they need it. You don’t need a smart toilet when a simple button does the trick.
Yes and no.
More complex systems can be engineered to be quite reliable. But there is little incentive to not make that sensor in the bulb as cheap as possible.
There are commercial solutions that are overkill, like bacnet. Which work more like industrial automation than fancy apps on your phone. Extra wires are run all over the facilitate communication between devices and work more with analog inputs and outputs. Having strong relays on circuits is far more reliable than a few relays inside bulbs where they get hottest and subject to the biggest thermal swings.
Smart homes run as consumer setups are a fucking mismatch of half finished environments where nothing is truly integrating everything. They are slowly built as new devices are made “smart.” And even going prosumer it’s still a hodgepodge solution.
Then there is the lack of vision. When people say “smart home” they have some mental image of the house doing all this cool stuff on its own. But only those who actually play with it will set some of those automations up. And in my personal experience, there isn’t all that much “smart” that needs to be done in a home. If the home owners aren’t thinking what the outcome is or what automations they will use, then it’s just a bunch of IoT shit sitting there mostly unused.
I’m not connecting my light bulbs to fucking wifi lol. My toothbrush doesn’t need Bluetooth. My door doesn’t need RFID.
I work in IT every day, I’m not going home to be spied on and troubleshoot why my lights don’t turn on (are the bulbs dead OR is my wifi spotty)
