"Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board, from smart speakers to the Roomba. It would be great if Apple changed that, but I'm not optimistic. I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.
Hey Google, can you turn off the baby bedroom light?
I'm sorry, I don't know that device.
So the only thing these devices are used for these days in my household are setting alarms and turning lights on/off. In the next home, probably won't even bother.
I know others here saying they can do it themselves but nothing beats asking google to turn off the lights in the house when I've forgotten and I'm cosy in bed already.
There also aren't that many areas where automation could possibly accomplish much. I think, the main directions are:
* Optimize energy usage (the same thermostat thing). It doesn't really amount to much. It could be useful in industrial setting, but for households it just doesn't save that much money, even if it works well.
* Cleaning. Making roombas deal with furniture or large objects left on the floor seems like mission impossible without a significant change in approach. Similarly for surfaces that are above the floor (desk, shelves etc.) Cleaning the exterior could be its own an quite an interesting thing though. Stuff like removing dead foliage from the roof for instance, or repainting the walls.
* Cooking. This could be potentially interesting, but will probably require a complete redesign of the tools used for cooking today to be reasonably priced. Eg. there would be no need for knives with handles for humans, because it's easier to make a slicing / chopping machine that has a very different configuration. Stoves and ovens would need to have some way of moving pots in and out automatically. Also, they'd probably have to be connected to the fridge and other kitchen storage... Which, in the end, means that it's not going to be an incremental upgrade. It will be also probably difficult to make the automated system coexist with human cooks...
You should see how wasteful typical American households are when they use a dumb thermometer. The best energy-saving feature is simply at-home vs away-from-home detection. I don't want my HVAC at home to run when I'm away at work or worse away at vacation, unless the temperature is really extreme. This easily saves me hundreds of dollars for a month-long vacation.
> Making roombas deal with furniture or large objects left on the floor seems like mission impossible
Roomba the company hasn't innovated in years. Switch to a different brand like Roborocks. Also don't choose models with a camera for privacy and performance reasons: lidar is much better.
The other big area of innovation is combo-vacuum+mop, including automatic water replacement and cleaning, but those features don’t seem to be fully ready for prime time yet. Roomba is behind the curve on this one.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
I’m familiar with the “woman on a toilet” story and I think it’s overblown. It was a prototype unit used for training the ML model, not a consumer unit.
I normally recommend people start their home automation journey with smart bulbs, ideally in their bedroom so they can speak their lights off and on while in bed, but long-term, switches are the best.
Exactly this.
I've had so many "aw fuck it I'll do it myself" moments with tech.
I no longer use any smart home devices. It was a passing fad as far as my experience goes.
Seemed cool, didn't really change my life.
That’s why Google is slowly getting out of it and shifting their focus from Nest. That’s why Apple never did much beyond a few speakers, and it’s why Amazon is right at home in that business (but even they’re getting out of the money-losing voice assistant aspect).
Robotics… seem like a miss to me. Very few tasks at home are as simple as vacuuming, but maybe I just lack the creativity and vision. Apple surely has some great tech left over from the car R&D so who knows. Apple is unfortunately not great at a “communal” perspective when making things.
I think a big issue no one talks about will be robot storage/garages. It’s already an issue for Roomba and anything bigger will be a no-go for many households. That is probably apples best chance - make it pleasant to look at and a status symbol.
Even vacuuming was pretty hard. Most vacuum robots were a disappointment until maybe 2 or 3 years.
Almost all other tasks either operate at human-hands level (significantly bigger robot) or need intimate understanding of you and your home (eg picking things up off the floor) or need a ton of dexterity (folding clothes). Or all three.
SwitchBot is working on something I haven't seen elsewhere yet: Making robot vacuums double as mops is becoming common, and and a few have modifications to hook into the water/waste lines so you don't have to refill it, but SwitchBot made that as part of its primary design because they got the idea to use the robot to ferry water around other places: it can automatically refill their humidifier and empty their dehumidifier.
I could imagine further enhancements for watering plants, or maybe if it's a success a future one that cleans rugs may become feasible.
Yes, you can do all of these things manually, but are you good at keeping a flawless schedule? It may not matter if you forget to turn on the coffee maker but it matters a lot if you forget to feed the fish. And you won't always be available to handle these things every single day, unless you work from home and follow an extremely rigid schedule.
How much time does it save you having your coffee maker or before you go to get coffee?
If this was an interview question I would reject the job. You don't seem worth working with.
If apple can refrain from sending the data to icloud or any other servers, then I would be very interested.
Or are these devices just so common, unremarkable, and ubiquitous now that you just aren’t noticing them anymore? I can’t think of any of my friends and family who don’t at least have some smart speakers and smart lighting devices in their home.
Smart door locks that you can open with your phone, and smart door bells and security cameras that you can monitor remotely are becoming pretty common too.
But a smart coffee maker? A smart clock? A smart dishwasher? All this garbage ended up being gimmicks and it ran out of steam so quickly.
I hope the things that are useful continue to get support as the big players abandon smart home expansion.
This is the answer.
HomeAssistant is fantastic and has unified everything of mine into a single platform. Control mostly happens through Google and Apple/Homekit devices (other than hardware switches), and everything works pretty seamlessly.
The only smart appliances I got are Philips hue lights which are nice but well, after the initial discovery, I use them as classical light bulbs 99% of the time. I’ve found zero useful automation (not saying they don’t exists) and I can’t see why I would control lighting from my phone (at least not enough to justify spending hundreds into smart bulbs and smart switches).
Ultimately, I’m not against smart home but since each home is unique, by definition, those objects are only useful if the user is willing to invest enough time to tailor the configuration to be useful in his own unique house.
Oh I thought about ranting about my experience with Sonos speakers which are really nice speakers with great audio quality for the money and size and everything you’d want except the "smart" part you are forced to use with their terrible (and closed) software.