Cheap Willl Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb. | Hacker News Reader

Cheap Willl Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb.

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52 pointscwan10 comments

The “bridges” mentioned are potentially one of the most interesting developments of the next few years. We’ve seen a huge, huge explosion of Arduino projects, but soon enough it’ll be commoditized and simplified for the layperson as in the Twine box(1). However, I’m particularly excited by CSR’s BLE (Bluetooth low energy) chips (2), a SoC promising 3 years battery life on a coin-cell for wireless peripherals, which could potentially create an entire universe of environmental sensing motes, similar to Nike+’s shoe-sensor. Unfortunately CSR is not particularly hacker-friendly, requiring a nearly 10k developer seat (3) to develop for the otherwise cheap chips.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

[2] http://www.csr.com/products/45/csr-energy

[3] http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=16425

The technical culmination of this vision would be that all of our expensive devices (i.e. refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters) will have simple APIs that can be controlled by any administration tool on any device.

For instance, our heating/air conditioning systems can have a standardized API that really only has the following functions, available (with some simple authentication) over any wifi connection:

1. Turn on 2. Turn off

Then an administration tool (probably on the cloud) can handle all the daily/weekly/monthly automation, provide a clean and easy to use interface, with all the complicated and special features we would like to see. We could change and upgrade our administration tools as we see fit. We would access them with our smartphones, home PCs, or for old schoolers, the wall mounted device.

Sigh. I have a simple device that does that already. It's called a thermostat.

Edit: I have the simple device, not a device that can be controlled from anywhere. But that's not a problem I have or need to have solved.

> But that's not a problem I have or need to have solved.

Sometimes it's hard to be aware of problems that exist. The fact that we have to interact with a thermostat on a regular basis is a problem. To save energy and reduce the need for us to remember to interact with the device, it might be nice for software to figure out when we leave or enter our homes (perhaps via GPS on our phones, or by some other detection mechanism) and control the device automatically. I am almost positive that your thermostat doesn't do this.

AC systems are an example of a dumb, expensive device that do come with an API... in the form of the built-in wiring for a thermostat. The thesis is that all your dumb, expensive devices should have something similar (preferably wireless rather than wired). Today you just connect it to a thermostat; in 10 years you might still have the same AC/heater and connect it to something smarter.

The airplay rollout has not been executed well.

Overall, it is successful of course. It's a killer feature and highly popular among consumers.

I believe it has been mismanaged for the following reasons.

First, rollout has been incredibly slow and there is still a major dearth of airplay enabled devices. This is not due to limitations of technology. Airplay comes from a company called BridgeCo, not Apple. BridgeCo did not do a good job of building OEM relations and following through to see Airplay implementations. This is not BidgeCo's fault, entirely. The BridgeCo team was a small (>6) executive staff in the states with an engineering team in India. While I do not know the full extent of Apple's imposed limitations, I know they were a factor. Still, BridgeCo had an opportunity to build a robust ecosystem- instead they were focused on selling SDK's for >$20k and not the front end UX. I do not think they were a Silicon Valley company culturally.

Apple has not taken a lead on pushing the technology as a standard at all. For the first year after Airplay's rollout, the only A/V receivers with airplay capabilities were super high-end Denons with a pricepoint near $1k. Not consumer. For the record, I haven't checked recently, this could still be the case. The market for 3rd party all-in-one speakers, the obvious destination for airplay technology, also developed very slowly.

Fortunately, apple sells a $99 airplay antenna called the Apple TV which can plug into just about any home theater system. Within the last few months though, Apple has been pushing updates to ATV's which has completely destroyed the airpay experience by locking down the format. I can no longer play downloaded video media on my non-jailbroken apple tv. Apple wants me to purchase streaming media from the Apple TV market- I don't care. I want to play the downloaded media on my laptop on my HDTV. Crazy, I know. Apple says no.

And this, of course, is the biggest fail of the Airplay rollout. Airplay is not just audio- it's video. This feature has zero presence on 3rd party devices- possibly positioning for an Apple HDTV launch. Still, BridgeCo (now SMSC) should have pushed the tech on HDTV OEMs.

While interesting, and slightly sad, none of this matters since ultimately airplay is the standard and I will continue to watch its development and buy airplay devices since there are no alternatives due to there being no other company developing next-gen core computing user experiences.

isn't logitech's squeeze an alternative? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server etc. i started hacking airplay to work with linux (rewrote the .net client in java), but gave up and bought the logitech hardware instead. it's open - the server is written in perl and runs perfectly on linux - interoperates with a bunch of stuff, and has been around for years, now.

I thought he was going to say that cheap devices will be smart as in they will collect our data, etc (so they can monetize) and expensive devices will not (because they're expensive and come with the added advantage of privacy)

The author does not seem to understand that with long upgrade cycle products, you want to include the minimal number of new / improved features. Otherwise, I won't buy a new tv for 15 years and you'll make no money. But what is that? You say you have Plasma? LED? HD resolution? Better refresh rate? Gimmicky 3D that no one supports? Of course I'll buy a new one!

With cell phones and tablets, the expected lifetime is only 1-2 years anyway.

Is the willl misspelling intentional?

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