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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Ah nooo please. Anyone but google. I love my Fitbit charge 3 and was thinking about replacing my Fitbit scale because my original model just died after 6 years. If google is going to buy Fitbit then I’m out.

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I've found that Garmin has higher quality hardware than Fitbit anyway. Every Fitbit I ever had ended up being replaced multiple times under warranty because the hardware was very low quality (or badly designed) and broke.

I wore my Charge 2 scrambling and rock climbing, scratched the shit out of the screen, dropped it, wore it to Tough Mudder, and somehow after 3 years of that it still just works.

Garmin hardware is great, but their software is terrible.

My friends and I had been using Garmin cycle computers and watches for a while, but lately we've been moving to Suunto and Wahoo devices - entirely due to software bugs.

My Fenix 5 watch freezes up 2 or 3 times a month. The screen will be frozen at a particular time for 5-10 minutes and it won't respond to any button presses, not even to turn it off. And they don't sync to the app without an internet connection. And the cycle computers freeze up on boot trying to download upgrades, even when you're in the midle of nowhere and haven't had an internet connection in days. Lots and lots of little annoyance bugs like those.

Definitely not designed for offline use, in any case.

Same here. Multiple iterations of the same product and every one of them broke. While it was nice that a few of them were replaced under warranty by FitBit, the fact that every one of them needed to be replaced is asinine.

There's much cheaper wifi scales out there that sync into the fitbit app. I've got a $40 weight gurus ones, works great.

100% so annoying - going to have to throw out my fitbit stuff if this goes through

And this is exactly why any consumer device that relies on the cloud is a bad idea. I would never buy a Ring doorbell or Nest camera for the same reason - I'd always look for a version that can be used locally so I can host the software myself and don't need to depend on a third party that may go bust, or get aquihired and shutdown.

Especially one that I'd have to install into a wall. I mean, I was always thinking that the whole "IOT lightbulbs" were at the wrong spot - that an IOT lightswitch would make more sense - you get all the lights on that circuit in one go, and you don't have the "is the light off because it's set off or is the switch off" thing.

But IOT device lifespan is way too short to be installed into a wall, even something as easy to DIY as a lightswitch.

Insteon has no cloud dependency and has been producing hardware compatible with the ones sold today since 2005, and it used to be backwards compatible with X10, which is from 1975. They use powerline and RF transmission, and interface with computers or hub devices usually via a transceiver.

I would actually recommend a more open standard today, such as Z-Wave or ZigBee, but the point is, plenty of IoT hardware is long-lived, it just isn't as trendy as what's marketed by Amazon or Google.

GE makes in-wall Z-wave light switches that work wonderfully. No cloud dependency, and you can control them with open source software like HomeAssistant.

I think Lutron Caseta is what you want for that.

No personal experience but I know people who have some and I haven't heard complaints.

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