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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand the value proposition of an IoT kitchen appliance.

This thing vs a $10 French Press in particular, but even internet connected crock pots and things. Monitoring my cooking food from across town doesn't solve any problem - if something goes wrong, there's nothing I can do about it and I've just added stress to my life that wasn't there previously.

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In a perfect world, where IoT stands for Intranet of Things, IoT companies do actual engineering, and turning products into services is illegal?

In that world, the use case isn't cooking food from across town. It's cooking food from another room.

I'm sitting in my home office right now. I'm working (well, on a HN break :)). My wife is playing with our child. I'm thirsty and I want a cup of tea now. My choices are either to distract myself for a couple minutes, which is annoying if the thirst hits in when I'm "in the zone". Or I could ask my wife, but she has better things to do and I don't like interrupting people unless it's necessary. In this perfect world I described at the beginning, I could just press a button on my keyboard to start the kettle, and would get a pop-up notification once the water is ready. I'd just get up and get my tea without losing focus, and without distracting anyone else.

Similar reasoning for other appliances.

Unfortunately, the way IoT is developing, I don't expect that future any time soon, because some of the features are in opposition to the business model under which IoT companies operate. A better bet for me would be to get an EE degree and mod the appliances myself (I'm not doing it now, because I'm afraid of letting my contraptions control anything that's connected to mains, or could otherwise start a fire).

EDIT:

Another way of putting the value proposition of IoT in a sane world: rich people hire assistants to handle trivial and distracting errands. IoT is supposed to be an equivalent of that, but available to everyone.

Technology creates its own addicts. I'm pretty sure someone is now collecting the information about dishes they made and calculating the calories cooked for the last year, etc.

Well, ideally your appliance is also IoT, so you can just shut it down.

The dream is for everything to be interconnected. Of course, that's also the nightmare

That's not my dream. I don't care in the slightest about everything being interconnected. I have only known one person who wanted that, and he worked with home-automation.

>That's not my dream. I don't care in the slightest about everything being interconnected.

Great for you, I guess. I wasn't really suggesting it was.

I was stating the ideal universe that these IoT devices want to exist in, in which their goals & operations start to make more sense.

I suppose, I was thinking the appliance caught fire (neighbors electric kettle did this a few year ago, not IoT). Shutting it off doesn't put out the fire. Or, soup boils over edge of pot - I have to clean that mess either way.

Maybe once IoT is sufficiently advanced, with robots and stuff, it turns into the "household servants for the Every Man" noted above.

And I'm not anti-tech. I have some IoT stuff (cameras) that serve no real purpose other than "look, I have cameras!"

Again, ideally, everything is so well connected you'd just stop the problem before it occurs, with sufficiently smart devices. Eg, your pot detects the rise, and sees its about to overflow, it can signal the stove to lower the heat. Same with the kettle -- it gets on fire when it runs out of water, but stays on. A "smart" kettle could detect that, and shut down before the fire starts. Of course, after the fire, there's nothing it can do... but targetting the cause rather than the symptom has potential, for probably many issues

But to be clear, I'm not advocating anything -- I'm just describing why IoT is a thing, and people get excited for. I don't actually believe this universe will really exist anytime soon, as it requires "sufficiently intelligent" technology and communication, which really almost starts to approach knowing how to cook your food for you to accomplish anything non-trivial

But the belief is what drives this tech.

This is how I feel about the security cameras we have at my house. Initially I got very anxious every time a (usually false-positive) alert arrived; now I'm so desensitized I basically ignore them. I know when my house or garage gets burglarized I'll have some nice, grainy over-exposed videos of the entire event but no real advantage over where I was before.

I have 3 cameras that I find use.

1. A weird part of the exterior. I don't physically walk back there often, so the camera is handy.

2. One at the mailbox/package drop spot. Not for theft, just to know when my packages arrive.

3. One in the "mechanical" room so I can check in while I'm away (we have hydronic heat, so we can't fully turn the water off in the winter).

It will also hopefully be time stamped. Video cameras for porch pirates seems to pay off well, though making a big mail box for your porch is probably more effective.

I have two. They serve mostly as a notification system for somebody in the house that I'm not expecting, but not a security problem (housekeeper, adult son drops by for some reason, neighborhood friend drops off a roll of fabric for my wife - but that's everybody with a key, so like I said, not a security thing).

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