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Comment by DarkCrusader2 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I haven't seen mention much with these "smart" devices is how inconvenient lack of physical buttons is. Instead of just reaching over and adjust the volume/brightness whatever, I now have to unlock the phone, find the app and do some gestures to achieve same results, all of which now requires some mental bandwidth for these banal tasks.

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That's just bad smart home planning. Any smart home device should work on top of existing physical control. Don't buy smart bulbs that require you to use your phone or voice to control them. Instead, buy smart switches that work just like normal wall switches but also give you smart home/automation possibilities (and work perfectly fine for guests or if the whole smart home system is down).

Don't buy some garage opener that requires internet access to control your garage, hook a smart relay into the existing garage opener.

Make sure there's a physical remote for your TV or sound system in addition to phone control. You can buy third party remotes just for this purpose.

Etc., etc., etc.

Pretty much any smart home project can be done in a way that keeps all physical control in place. Yes, it costs a little more and requires a little more work, but it's the only reasonable solution.

This is exactly right. If you set out with some requirements such as 1) everything must be able to still work without internet access and 2) it must be simple enough that my mom/grandma/whatever can still use it, then you can still benefit from the convenience of these devices without all the downsides.

This is what I do. I insist that any “smart” whatever be strictly additive; that is, it must only add functionality but not remove anything. I will never buy a product that can’t be controlled physically or that requires Internet access. The net result is pretty great!

Yup. With this approach the only thing that goes wrong is you start to rely on some of the automations and it's a bit annoying if one stops working for some reason.

100% agree, this is how I approach all of my home automation toys. Periodically I disconnect my HA server and then the Internet connection just to verify that the fallback position for my house that everything still works manually just like you expect.

This looks very dependent on whether you're renting or owning.

If I'm renting a place, swapping out the light bulbs is feasible, swapping out the light switches is not

Sure, lots of reasons you can’t create the most very optimal experience. But even if you can’t swap out the switches in your rental there are other options if you keep “physical first” in mind. There are even smart switches made to stick over a regular light switch so you can keep people from turning it off (and this deactivating the smart bulb) and still have a physical switch, but it’s actually controlling a smart light.

Starting with a hard requirement of physical control still leaves lots of things on the table.

Agree. My first rule of smart home is that the device must continue to work as if there was no smart home layer. The only place I violate this is for devices like outdoor holiday lights where I’d have to walk outside to flip the switch - though you should also be able to do that, if needed.

Yup. One of the reasons I still tolerate the obtuse GUI of HomeSeer is it's 100% local to me, yet can also still interface with a few proprietary cloud bits I fell for like Nest's thermostats.

Never again. I only have a couple of cloud controlled devices but never again - I'll either have something that can be controlled without any reliance on the cloud whatsoever or I'll just continue to go without that thing being automated. I really can't think of anything that would not be automatable without the cloud

Just yesterday, I replaced the smart thermostats on my radiators with old-fashioned manual ones, and removed the window sensors, control hub and everything else associated with it. The whole eQ-3 ecosystem will be shut down soon anyway, and replaced with a full-scale intelligent house-type product line.

I have ordered new thermostats that are electronic and support daily/weekly schedules, but have no networking aside from Bluetooth, which you have to manually turn on via a button on the thermostat, if you want to make changes to their programming.

Aside from that they function more or less like the good old manual thermostats, you turn a dial to select the temperature you want, but they display the selected temperature in degrees instead of a scale from 1 to 5, and they automatically turn down the heating if they sense a temperature drop when you open the windows to air out.

Intelligent but not "smart" thermostats. If the app disappears for some reason or you just don't want to use it, they will still function just fine as an improved version of the old-fashioned manual thermostats. According to the manufacturer, they also calibrate themselves to know when to turn on and off to match your programmed schedule, based on how quickly your house heats up and cools down, and something about finding the exact position at which your radiator valve opens, for more precise control. Nifty stuff and it still doesn't require an internet connection or a nebulous cloud account.

When your hands are occupied by cooking or some such, it's nice to bark orders at a voice assistant for timers, lighting adjustments, adding to the shopping list, etc.

I think the parent commenter was not annoyed by the fact that they could use an app but that they have to.

He's got a point. My smart lights are the only reason I even own a Google Home assistant. The rest of the features are not very important to me.

I have a few 'smart' things in my house. One is my living room mood lights, but that's a combination of a simple RF plug relay switch on the one hand, and an ikea (also RF?) spot system, no internet required.

The other thing is my thermostat, where it's mainly convenience to control it remotely via my phone. I'm not comfortable with it, it has a dongle directly in my router giving the company behind it access to it and its data. I mean the charts are convenient, but I think the whole thing could be made offline as well. Anyway, that one has a simple screen (LED light matrix?) and touch buttons so anyone can adjust the temperature until the next time block, making just the unit without the app as useful as the old dial thermostat it replaced.

Final 'smart' thing I have is my wifi router, which I can manage via my phone; a big improvement over the old router/modem which had a very 2000's looking web interface.

I don't really mind having less buttons to accidentally push on my phone or other devices that go in my pocket, but I can't stand this when it comes to car dashboard interfaces. Thankfully I still drive a car from before this trend but in newer cars where e.g. changing the radio station requires fiddling with a touch screen. With physical buttons or knobs I can do this almost unconsciously, but with a touch screen I have to take my eyes off the road to even see what I'm poking on the screen.

With this kind of stuff, it always makes me wonder why it's there in the first place. Surely there's not much demand for touch screens in cars, and it must be more expensive to produce than analog buttons and knobs. Why has it become so ubiquitous?

This problem will depend on the vendors you buy your products from.

Having a few brands of smart home devices which are all compatible with homekit, I just swipe down on my lockscreen and have all of them as shortcuts in the single native interface or use my watch to operate them with voice.

Android seems to have the Google Home app for this exact same reason, but I have no idea how well that works.

I absolutely second this. "IoT" is a keyword to furnish up cheap hardware where the price of physical switches would have harmed the profit margin too much. This is not really ironic: Physical switches (with a price of probably 0,2 USD per component) are more expensive then SoC having Wifi implemented. Also it's cheaper to hire software-only developers to do as little hardware engineering as possible. It's all about cutting the price per unit down.

It probably costs more to add physical knobs/switches. They will end up taking more space/require more material to manufacture than the IoT device itself.

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