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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

You do realize the worst case scenario for this stuff is that the house is no longer smart right?

A worse case is when you spend effort to make it smart, made decisions that rely on being smart, and then it suddenly becomes not smart at some point.

No, it works fine. You just could not remotely control it from outside the house. I didn’t even notice.

> You just could not remotely control it from outside the house

And what about disabled folk who might rely on the smart functionality of the house to have something resembling an independent life? Or the elderly? Even if e.g. a smart bulb fails gracefully and becomes a non-smart bulb in the absence of the cloud, it doesn't help if you have cannot operate a normal light switch effectively.

A lot of comments on this article seem to think smart home devices are only for the lazy or are toys for people with more money than sense, but there are plenty of "legitimate" use cases as well.

Also, while I would never want to use it myself, relying on the cloud is perfectly valid - the simple fact is most people are incapable of hosting and maintaining their own smart hub [1], and Insteon fucked up big time by not having a better transition plan.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ The source is paywalled, but this article is a decent summary. TL;DR if we assume running your own smart hub is a "level 3" task, only about 5% of people in a country would be capable of doing so.

> And what about disabled folk who might rely on the smart functionality of the house to have something resembling an independent life? Or the elderly?

Again, the house just becomes non-smart. What about them? You can't say "I prefer dumb homes because smart homes might stop being smart" "Yeah but then they just become dumb" "But what about people who can't have dumb homes?"

That's not an advantage of a dumb home, it just sucks for people who rely on something when the something stops working.

It reminds me of the standup bit where no escalator should ever be "out of order". It should just say "escalator temporarily stairs". I've got some smart lights, but worst case, they still have a lightswitch that works.

No, worst case scenario is that the house has no contolls at all. Lights permanently on or off while brain dead switches are locked up trying to talk to servers that are no longer there.

Note this isn't what happened in this case, but it is a worst case scenario.

I'd feel worse about the wasted time and money.

sunk cost. you got to enjoy the smart home for some period of time, just not forever. yea its totally annoying, but its not wasted entirely.

Many people I know with smart home stuff enjoy the tinkering a bit, and find its another thing to be restless about and fiddle with, and don't "set and forget" anyways.

If I spent a lot of time and money making something and someone else immediately broke it I’m not sure I would be as satisfied with the experience alone of having invested time and money in it as you, but I have to say theres something to be said for having that incredible level of optimism and ability to stay positive.

It'd be a bad investment. E.g. spend money to smarten up your home and enjoy living in it for the next, say, 20 years, vs. only enjoying it for a year because hey it's a cloud service that's died...

Also being left with ewaste, and money you have spent on a product that can no longer be used.

No, you can still use all the switches. A light switch that turns lights on and off isn’t ewaste.

It is e-waste if you still want smart switches, and if they were smart until yesterday then your revealed preference on that point is pretty clear?

The worse case scenario is your smart home leaving online signals such that crime rings are aware when your not home, or more/worse.

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