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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

In the world of IoT, everything-is-an-app and disposable electronics, I'm increasingly appreciating "appliance" electronics. Things that do one thing well.

I recently got a baby monitor - there's plenty of IoT enabled wifi ones which use your phone as the display, but the one I chose was simple and standalone. It just works. No software, no app, no security implications. I can give it to someone else and it'll work for them too.

I wonder what other areas of our life we should be unbundling again into appliances?

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I think a lot of consumers are going to wake up in a few years and feel ripped off when their smart thermostat or smart lock or smart lights are no longer supported and have lost the functionality they’ve paid extra for.

I miss the days when you pay for some set of functionality and it stays with the device for the duration of ownership. The standard seems to be to buy on one set of value propositions and to find them degraded over time (see Peloton eliminating Apple Watch support for all exercises but cycling this week as a recent example). I think this is what makes Tesla special with regular OTA updates increasing functionality.

Especially with the rising cancer known as SaaS. Soon you'll need to be paying $10/mo for your thermostat to work, and you'll need to fork over another $200 every other year to upgrade the hardware.

And then the company will be purchased by a FAANG and you will immediately be forced into using new accounts and new workflows for the same functionality (yes, suddenly thermostats have workflows now...)

It's a small price to pay for the new Amazon Lord of the RingsTM television event where everyone's heaters will kick on at max whenever there's fire on screen.

This is actually an improvement. It aligns the incentives of the guys making your thermostat's web UI. Otherwise your thermostat wouldn't get new features and security updates

No, I want security updates without surveillance, without lock-in and without a monthly fee.

Sounds like too much to ask?

This is what Linux distributions has been providing for decades. And my 486 PC was less powerful than some thermostat.

SaaS gets hated on too much here. The incentives work out as well for desktop software - there's no longer the incentive to add new features to justify customers purchasing a new version (or withhold features until the new version). The problem I've seen is that it almost always comes with a big price hike when compared to an alternative of upgrading every 3 years. The only exception to this I can think of is Office 365 which still remains a deal.

Its a fucking thermostat.

I don't need the company to be bankrolling a $2mm/yr AI team so that the thermostat can try to make better guess about when I want to turn on the heat.

You don't, but they do. By analysing how you use thermostats they may figure you need an AC and sell your profile to AC makers.

I totally agree. My personal philosophy has been to only buy OT devices that fail/stop being supported to being manual and not fail to being e-waste.

and the more built-in and capital intensive, the worse it will be. It's not so bad to have an internet radio die, as has happened with several architectures thus far, but it's painful when there's real money involved.

I always marvel at the people who built new homes with subfloor heating systems who usually have a closet full of manifolds, valves, custom PCBs-in-a-box, none of which will be available in a decade or two.

In addition, even if well supported (like Tesla), there's a number of product families that are priced like long term investments (electric cars, solar panel/battery setups) but have shorter term PC-style turnovers in technology. They may still work, but will be obsolete.

Subfloor heating systems aren’t just a water boiler in the basement and bunch of dumb water tubes?

Yeah I don't think the person you're replying to has any experience in building control systems. I used to be an energy engineer and I would predict sub-floor heating owners will have no real issues here.

The point does stand generally though. I have had to replace entire HVACs because the coolant is no longer available or because the cost to replace a certain component is too high because the parts are no longer readily available.

I think the only solution is to try to build as minimally as possible. A huge amount can be accomplished through passive heating and cooling (windows placement and size, site location and angle toward prevailing winds and morning / afternoon sun, etc etc). We are too often reliant on technology to allow us to ignore these things and we do so at our peril.

>experience in building control systems

lol. If you mean 'design', you'd be surprised. Admittedly, I'm not aware of the full array of residential heating control systems, but I've sure seen some over-complex ones.

I've seen some that most definitely were not, usually along with a bunch of other high-efficiency tech. To be fair, I've seen minimum systems also, so it can be done.

My general take on home design is simple-passive-accessible. Someone in the future will thank you.

It's worth poking around manufacturer's websites. http://www.pexheat.com/Catalog/Controls

and consider the lifespan of a house vs. the lifespan of the subsystems. My general take is that the more built-in and difficult to modify it is, the madder someone will be in 50 years. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm no fan of radiant heating systems having seen the issues of parts availability, latency, the tearing up of floors for repair,and a strong preference for point sources of heat (gas stoves for example), so it might show through in the comment.

Recommend reading "Ghost Fleet" where even your toilet stops working when we go to war with a country that manufactures many of our electronic components.

When you get bored, list all of your connected home and personal items that rely on wired, cable, wifi, bluetooth, rfid, infrared, cellular, etc. Put them in a spreadsheet.

Then you will not be as surprised when your lighting system, refrigerator, or washer/dryer is hit with ransomware.

This is absolutely why I refuse to purchase any smart home products that aren't fully functional within the Apple Home app. If something cannot work offline and without a central service then it doesn't belong in my home.

I think that's the primary value proposition for Apple HomeKit and I'm really quite sad that more companies, and Apple themselves, don't put more effort into supporting it.

I am an admitted Apple fanboy, but even I recognize that Apple is an offender in this field. We have tons of old Apple iPhones and iPads that had functionality that no longer works - app developers stopped supporting the only iOS that can be loaded on the device. It is only a matter of time before this happens to HomeKit too.

I bought some FEIT rgb smartbulbs at costco (there were on sale I think it was $5 or $10 each) but yes I don't like the outsourced service (tuya), even though I normally turn them off with a switch. I even wrote FEIT suggesting they make a slightly more expensive hobby version where you can still overwrite the esp32 firmware, etc so you don't need this "free" service and could connect the directly to say something like home assistant. I think I would willing to pay something (maybe $5) just for the keys to overwrite the firmware, like the license you have to buy for your raspberry pi to use the mpeg-2.

After-sales profits are the dream they're chasing.

That's why it'll be increasingly hard to get a dumb TV, because after-sales profits keep going without having to make anything.

>> I recently got a baby monitor ... no security implications.

There’s one somewhere near me that broadcasts crystal clear audio on 49.990MHz - right smack on the edge of the 6 metre band in very crisp 15khz wide FM. This audio quality beats all my local ham radio buddies. I can hear a pin drop in their house.

I’ve no idea who’s house, briefly before the pandemic i made a reasonable effort to track down the house and let them know, it’s not a house in my street, no one has the young children that can be heard.

Every time I’m on 6m i always see it on my band scope, 20db over.

I don't recommend you do it, but engineer in me is trying to find technical solutions to all problems. If you can hear them presumably they can hear you on the same frequency. So you could get in contact by broadcasting on the same frequency. You can already hear them on the radio, so if they hear you on a child monitor that would be a weird-but-functional walkie talkie setup.

Depending on where you are, it's possible that stress from knowing that their child monitor is unsecured is much higher than the risk of anyone within broadcast range abusing the vulnerability. Moreover, it's possible that whatever they replace the device with will have more significant problems to worry about. For example cloud vulnerable to the whole world instead of enthusiasts with radios in a small local area.

> I'm increasingly appreciating "appliance" electronics. Things that do one thing well.

Plus dedicated physical buttons! FiiO provides a rotary volume control on their flagship $1000 player, https://audiosolace.com/2020/09/04/fiio-m15-review/

They also put a rotary volume control on my external DAC/headphone amp that cost a tiny fraction. And I must say I love that now I don't have to choose between two volume levels which are either a bit too quiet or a bit too loud.

And that no software automatically dials back the volume every 10-15 minutes with a notification telling me that it's convinced I'm damaging my ears.

>no security implications It's broadcasting video through some unknown protocol, are you sure it's (properly) encrypting it?

It’s sounds like it’s closed loop, and not connected to the internet/WiFi. I would say that makes it thousands of times less likely to be hacked, even if there was some fundamental issue with the encryption.

Even a fully unencrypted local video feed would require someone to park outside your house for the duration of the broadcast to capture it all. Meanwhile, in the cloud, user data sometimes gets dumped into unsecured S3 buckets that anyone in the world could access. Even if the video is properly secured, there's no guarantee the service in question is not keeping it indefinitely for marketing/machine-learning/other purposes and it eventually leaks in a security breach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Do_One_Thing_a...

I was recently shopping for bicycle power meters because I want to know exactly how bad I am at pretending cars don't exist (I'm slow, folks). There's been an explosion in direct-to-consumer companies making them. I was looking at a self-installed crank strain gauge model where the tradeoff is that in exchange for your own DIY skills and time it costs less than half what pedal meters would cost. But I found out the company folded, the app isn't supported anymore meaning you can't calibrate the unit, so you might end up being unable to do anything with one of the units you happen to come across. Brutal!

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/02/watteam-powerbeat-gen2-p...

I feel like this every time I use my cameras. They do one thing and do it exceedingly well. They feel like _tools_ rather than gadgets or devices.

>No software, no app, no security implications. I can give it to someone else and it'll work for them too.

Is it like a wired connection between the Camera and the Monitor?

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