I think you’d have to go out of the way to buy a toothbrush with Bluetooth, and I see many a non-smart fridge in the best sellers at Home Depot. (https://www.homedepot.com/b/Appliances-Refrigerators-Side-by...)
For all the hooplah about smart homes and Alexa and Thread and Merlin Mann screaming about HomeKit and blah blah blah…most people have dumb lightbulbs, dumb garage doors, and dumb fridges.
The obvious exception is a smart TV, which are effectively mandatory now. And…after years of being a contrarian…guess what? I like my Roku-enabled TV. The apps are nice. I don’t have to have an external box. It’s fine. More than fine, even—I am kinda shocked at how good this Amazon-special TCL TV is.
For now. The profits to be made on microtransactions and subscriptions from internet-requiring features are too gargantuan to pass up, to not become the new norm. And, of course, unblockable ads and tracking.
A fun recent example is a motorcycle emergency vest that stops inflating when you stop paying the subscription. An outlier for now, but the average tomorrow; The slope is real and it's coated with vaseline.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/34547/bmw-is-planning-to-sell-...
But still…that’s high-margin subscriptions on top of a high-margin product. I am, currently, skeptical we will end up with low-end Internet of Shit for everything, because running that subscription service requires a big up-front investment that’s hard when you’re selling, I don’t know, toaster ovens.
So I really don't see internet-connected X taking over the market, no matter how much money companies could make if customers cooperated.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yyyd/this-motorcycle-airba...
- Historically, the TV has been used for playing media transmitted on radio waves, so an internet connected TV isn't a big surprise.
- Television media formats seem to completely shift every decade or 2, so people are very used to buying something they'll throw away soon.
- People usually take their televisions around with them when they move houses, but not appliances. Transfering "smart" things between owners is generally a pain and a security hazard.
But true that appliance seems to be attach to the houses here. And correct, smart things are private things because of the nature of their work.
I have a fridge that my grand father used. And I’m not specially young. I love that fridge, simple and frugal in energy.
I suspect the smart fridge and the like will come with incentive from large comglomerate that also sell food.
The « two day delivery » of the smart fridge. I guess a coupon.
Oh well.
Appliances have made huge strides in energy efficiency in the last 30 years.
Why not get a TV with Netflix built in? At this point, it just makes sense to have apps on the TV.
I don't think washing machine makers have this option, nor is the internet a threat to replace washing machines. Of course business majors keep graduating and they will get bright ideas like selling information about what you wash to third parties, and they will have dreams of subscription revenue, but until they can provide a compelling value proposition, these are not going to get widely adopted. TVs are declining in price at 20% a year. Users are getting great value in exchange for putting up with the ads.
"Dumb" cars have chips too.
In comparison, my electric kettle is much smarter, and most likely requires a chip to make all the logic around the various buttons and the screen and the water temperature settings work. Still, it has zero connectivity.
Why does my toothbrush have to connect to bluetooth?
Why does my refrigerator twitter?
How often do you brush your teeth? What toothpaste do you use? Maybe your dentist needs to know that or, at least, someone from some (big) (tech) company doing data science about it for whatever reason (mostly to show you ads).
Knowledge is power.
(Crickets.)
So don't hold your breath for this stuff to take off. Most people won't spend more money to buy something that will benefit someone else.
The only use case I can see is a notification when the cycle is done, but I think there are better ways to go about that than using an SoC.
I'm a programmer and honestly I can't wait for this IoT fad to die down a little. Sure, maybe it's cool to have LAN connected lightbulbs as a novelty product. But this kind of shit will never ever be the norm, simply because it makes no damn sense in terms of value proposition.
And guess what mr programmer, they didn't bother letting me do that with the front panel...
Why would you want your clothes to sit wet, collecting mold, before the drying begins?
See, part of being a good programmer is figuring out a solution using the tools you have. Which includes figuring out how existing machines address your issues without requesting they come with a fully programmable API and wi-fi, just so you can delay the drying cycle.
If I were to do this it would take 4 trips to the washing machine because they didn't think to make it tick over from even washing to drying.
Thinking you can dry your clothes better than the people who engineered the entire machine and wrote its programs is honestly cracking me up. Do you think the vendors were like "you know what, we don't need this washing machine to dry well".
Even more, what kind of a marketing campaign would such a scriptable machine even have?
"Our washing machine dries really poorly, but we hope every stay at home mom can script it to dry better, so we included a web server and a REST API with it".
They'll go bankrupt, man.
And thanks, I'll just spend this months rent on a new washing machine.
And yeah, uhmm... most washing machines can run drying after washing. You just took your specific model's issue, and decided to generalize it to "must be scriptable". Which is really a giant leap to make. To recap:
1. Your specific model can't dry after washing.
2. Your specific model can't be scripted either.
3. Other models can dry after washing.
4. Other models have no scripting.
Ergo whatever you do, you're buying a new washing machine. And your problem doesn't require scripting.
I'm a professional programming language implementer why can't I use those skills to do as I please?
Wrt to your previous comment, of course I'm talking about my model of washing machine.
I genuinely cannot fathom how it's hard to work out that my point is that if they'd stuck even the most basic interface on the back, which I bet the higher end ones already have for debugging just not exposed, I could make the machine do what I want. That's not the way the world is, but it would be better if it was.
Luckily for you I'm able bodied by the way...
If you're an expert, then you can hack with the debug interface, many enthusiasts do things like that with their devices.
And if you're not an expert, you don't want, you can't, and you'd never need to script your washing machine.
Edit: oh no apparently it's a questionably maintained communal laundry room unit, I'm so sorry
- Being able to trigger dimming of the lights in the house as sunset approaches. - Being able close all the lights in the house in one go (such as when leaving). - dimming lights when I don’t have dimmers wired in. - being able to adjust colour temperature of the lights (and full colours, I tend to use a mix of oranges, pinks, and purples). - turning off lamps that are not otherwise on the same circuit as the ceiling when I flick a switch.
Things like dimming and controlling lights on the same circuit could be done with electrical work, but I’m renting. The bulbs come with me wherever I move. The electrical work doesn’t. I already was bringing my own lightbulbs wherever I moved anyways (to save electricity).
Any more understanding than that would be sub-optimal for shipping consumer products where cost optimisation is a primary concern as the salaries for more competent engineers would cost the company more.
You can see this effect in action with the explosion of “smart home” devices after commoditised internals were made available by the likes of Tuya. Suddenly your company only needed junior engineers who could skin the whitebox turn-key solutions and product designers who could design a moulded plastic enclosure around a standard set of postage stamp sized circuit boards.
Great.
There is no incentive to be any better than that. When the average washing machine lives long enough that the majority of consumers will come back to their next purchase without feeling annoyed about software related issues. Extra frills that pushed them over the line into purchasing a particular model didn't quite work out how they hoped, the iPhone app didn't get updates and looks bad on their new phone, etc ... these things wont factor into their next purchase. It's a psychological time horizon thing, enough water passes under the bridge and the customer stopped caring long enough ago.
So as long as it was otherwise a solid washing machine that didn't have mechanical issues mechanically or wash poorly they aren't likely to hold the manufacturer to account for their poor software quality breaking the "nice to haves".
What would you want to script?
An ESP-32 is about 2 quid last time I checked, I have many, and I would happily attach it to the machine if not for the fact that it doesn't belong to me.
Also, the thing that's more annoying is actually that the machine's alarm is extremely quiet and the timer very inconsistent (e.g. I made a Pizza oven that sends me an email, and it wasn't hard to do at all).
Also, of course, there's the "internal scheduling" of various different activities that the machine is doing; you can do that mechanically but IMHO it's simpler now to do that with a cheap microcontroller.
wait what do you mean I still need to physically walk to the washing machine to load it this is bullshit