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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

IoT is a fad in the current way we're going about it.

What's not a fad is getting devices to communicate their health and status to an upstream repository for things like predictive analytics.

This is already happening in the B2B sector. It will reach the consumer sector next, but like you said it will take 2-3 consumer product cycles to make it real.

It won't be about remote control or any of the barely useful use-cases you're seeing with fridges and door locks and water bottles. It will be knowing your home's A/C has two weeks of operation before it seizes up. It will be knowing your home's plumbing has frozen and burst while you were away.

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I've bought a lot of "IoT" devices (going back to the days of X10) and yeah lot of them are utterly useless, but so were a lot of dotcom startups in 1999.

The thing I've realized, which may be obvious, is that first and foremost the device needs to work well in its "unconnected" form. Examples:

* Hue/LIFX/etc suck because most of the time I just want to flip a light switch, not pull out my iPhone to control it. I'm a fan of Z-Wave (or whatever) switch replacements that function just fine as regular switches, or I can turn off every light in my house through a wall controller, Alexa, or my iPhone. But if that secondary system fails I can still control my lights.

* Withings scales are great, because it works well as a simple scale, but also records my weight so I can go back and look at trends, etc.

* I like Dropcams because they're super easy, though I wish it weren't locked to a proprietary service

I have the Hue dimmer switch which makes them infinitely more useful. I can now control my lights without having to pull wires etc.

That may work, as long as you can prevent people from using the wall or lamp switch, and if it works even if your internet connection/router is down. My preference is for more hard-wired/bulletproof solutions.

Yes it works with no internet connection, you connect to a hub on the local network.

Pulling a new wire is better but also much more expensive. Adding a new switch for me is~200 and I can't move it around like the Hue.

Both of those use cases (AC/plumbing) are good, but cannot be stand alone products. These sensors will be integrated into your next AC unit or PEX manifold. They also need to be robust enough to last the full duration of the unit.

The major issue is the platform. Commercial products already have dedicated terminals, so the platform already exists. But I don't want to have to install the AC app on every new phone just to monitor it. Or renetwork my house when I buy a new router (imagine having your grandparent struggle through that).

I think what you'll see first is the manufacturers embed the transport layer directly into the hardware and use cheap cellular connections to talk directly to the factory. The entire service will be either opaque to the customer, available for a "subscription", or part of a warranty.

The last-mine problem of standardizing the link from device to internet is going to be a hard one for a long time to come, IMO.

The "TV in the refrigerator" IoT is definitely a fad, but you're right, there's a fundamental need to connect devices together and to a central managing/monitoring service.

There is also a fundamental need to have those devices be secure. Consumers take this for granted because they have been secure for so long. They don't know what's coming. And when they find out then there whole thing will probably blow up. It just takes a few companies to tarnish it for everybody else.

The problem with IoT is the I

The problem is the lack of corporate liability. If they used some alternative to the internet we'd be reading about how it makes the SWIFT network look secure add long as the alternatives are “spend money and time doing it responsibly” or “ship it now with a strong EULA”.

That stuff kills me when it's marketed like that. It's not IoT! Having a tablet or a TV or Twitter in your computer isn't IoT, it's just a shitty tablet, and it still required human intervention. That's literally the Internet we have right now. IoT would be your fridge talking to the store and telling them you need more milk, and then you get a shipment of milk. But that's infinitely harder than taping a tablet to a fridge, so Samsung sells us a tablet taped to a fridge and it's called IoT.

Connected devices are not IoT. Marketing needs to learn that.

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