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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

The reason why the smart home keeps faltering is that it provides little value to the customers. It's not the cloud, or the monetization schemes, it's that it turns out that flipping light switches or pressing a button on the thermostat is not a big pain point for people, and using smart-home technology is as often inferior to old dumb tech as it is superior.

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I generally agree but having a lightbulb that can be scheduled to change brightness, temperature, and on/off status has been pretty great for my sleep. Only being able to control it with my phone is a pain in the ass especially when the widget breaks and I now have to unlock, open an app, and flip through screens just to enter my bedroom.

Right. I have a smart bulb and there are things that it's good for (I like super dim warm light for having enough light to see by but not waking me up), but turning on your light with your phone is awful. I use Alexa for it and it's not a ton better. Most of the lights in my house I actively don't want to have smart versions of.

Yeah, does seem like quite a bit of that. After many decades it's relatively easy to buy a $20 dead bolt for a door and it will resist easy attacks, take a fair bit of abuse, and likely last decades.

The "cloud enabled" version, from a well known brand no less, has all plastic internals, can't take any abuse, and even 5 seconds with a $2.00 screw driver you are in.

Please name this well known brand. I have Zigbee deadbolts that have mostly the same mechanical parts as their completely manual counterparts. This is largely due to them still being manual, keyed locks with the addition of a touchpad.

This is just it. I have an amazingly smart home: in every single room, I have installed a robust remote control for lighting that cannot get lost, can be replaced for $5 if it breaks, and is perfectly customizable with interchangeable face plates. The kids can even paint them!

I don't need my lights to turn on and off on their own. I don't buy that anyone does, short of perhaps someone who has a physical disability for whomst it would be too difficult. For $20 I can get a timer - perfect for the closet light we always used to leave on by accident.

I think this is basically conspicuous consumption, tasteless pseudo-luxury. I am not impressed by your IoT colorful lightbulbs; impress me with your conversation.

> whomst

> whomsth

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