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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

For me, pretty much none of the "smart home" stuff with rare exceptions (e.g. my bedroom was never updated with a light switch) actually does anything that saves me any real effort. There are a ton of things I'd like to just wish away but they require manipulation of the physical world.

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For me the one irreplaceable ‘smart home’ feature is circadian lighting. There are ‘smart’ fixtures that will do this themselves but I’ve found scheduling on a per-room basis to be workable (albeit at times a maintenance headache) for coming on 12 years now.

Absolutely can’t live happily with dumb lights only. It’s not just aesthetics - I believe it has a major impact on my sleep health.

Are you considering as circadian lighting the control of just the brightness and when they come on or also including the change from cool to warm light color as well? The ability to change the color temp of the lights is the killer point for me. Anything above 3600K is a no go for me after sunset

Both! My lights go dim and deep red after sunset but very bright and cold mid-day.

I've found the same. I've been interested in smart homes stuff for 10+ years. My dad had z-wave in his beach home 15 years ago (not exactly an early adopter, but it was pre-HomeKit and pre-influx of cheap wifi devices).

Between flaky software/firmware, fear of network security, device incompatibilities, and the slow but steady enshitification of all the things, the industry has been a real let down.

I have a Smartthings hub, 4 z-wave switches, 2 z-wave wall warts, a handful of Sonos speaker (pre-voice assistant models), 2 HomePod Minis, one old Echo mini, and an Apple TV.

The Sonos and Echo pre-date HomeKit. The Echo only exists to add voice control to Smartthings and Sonos. "Alexa, play music in the living room" "Alexa, turn on the outside lights". Sadly, Sonos's software has been on a downward spiral for a few years now. The latest iOS app is less intuitive and reliable than the previous. And my wife's iPhone 16 Pro wouldn't connect to the network for months - I eventually had to shut it all down, hard reset everything, and rebuild the Sonos network. I'm done with them.

The Apple TV was bought for TV (duh), but serves as the Homekit base station. The HomePod Minis replaced a couple of Sonos in our bedroom (see above). But, Spotify doesn't play natively on the HomePod because Spotify and Apple seem to be in a state of corporate Cold War. So, that kinda sucks.

I'd love to add a few more light switches, but I'm reluctant to add any more Z-wave since it doesn't talk to Homekit (without rolling some sort of 3rd party bridge, which means adding another device to my network and managing it manually myself). So, I'm kind of stuck with what I have until I find the gumption to replace it all with Caseta or similar.

It's all a big old mess. But at least the shitty ecosystem has kept the house relatively uncomplicated. My wife manages to use all the things without much trouble. So I guess that's a plus.

I have a couple Apple TVs but they're basically for TV and music. My pair of Alexas, the one in the bedroom is basically to turn on a light that doesn't have a switch and set an alarm. I can use it for music but rarely do.

I do have an RPi camera that I now have to figure out why I can't connect to and a thermometer that is supposed to alert me below a certain range that I also need to debug. But that's about it.

Give me SmartHome that can load and unload the dishwasher and I'd be happier.

That's been my experience as well... it's a downward trend of reliability. Forty years ago my parents had a bunch of Radio Shack home automation stuff that was actually reliable, though functionally simple. Apart from Philips devices attached to a Philips hub, everything else I've tried in the last decade has been flaky in some way.

I used some X10 stuff for a number of years after I bought my 200 year old house which had a lot of pull chain lights and the like. Actually worked pretty well.

Apart from Philips devices attached to a Philips hub, everything else I've tried in the last decade has been flaky in some way.

Everyone says the Philips bulbs are so reliable, yet they are the 2nd flakiest devices in our house (2nd only to those complete shit Leviton light switches that lose their minds once a month). One more “no response” when I open you in HomeKit, and I swear…

Are you using them with the Philips hub, or on their own?

Philips hub, latest hardware, reset multiple times. There’s just something flakey about our setup. It might even be that the bulbs are, what, going on ten years old? Maybe newer ones are more reliable.

Or I’ll just replace them with Nano bulbs that use Matter. Those have been rock-solid.

I'm in the same boat as you around Sonos. Find any alternatives that you're considering that aren't HomePod?

Nope, nothing easy. I went with HomePod Minis since we're not audiophiles and almost everything else in the house (laptops, iPads, phones) is Apple.

My only complaints are - lack of Spotify integration (you can AirPlay it, but not play it "natively") and you need an Apple Musi sub to play any alarm sound that isn't the default ear-splitting noise (it'll wake you up, but it's jarring - I prefer some "yoga" music or similar).

Sound quality is good enough for background music. If I wanted higher quality, I guess I'd get full-size HomePods.

I don’t know if a vacuum robot counts but it saves us tons of effort. We wake up to a freshly vacuumed home every morning.

You need to have a very specific house layout. My brother does. I don't. A Dyson stick vac is much more useful for me than a vacuum robot would be.

It doesn’t need to be that specific the only problem I can foresee is that it cannot go downstairs. In my case, I just got two of them one for my upper floor and one for my ground floor. If you get some of the more advanced ones now they’re not particularly affected by wires, tassels, etc.

It's a very old house with lots of transitions over the years. Benefits from a few stick vac sweeps now and then but a robot vac wouldn't work well.

I would reframe what you said as it doesn’t work for specific house layouts. The vast majority should be able to use them with no problems.

In my experience, most houses have transitions between sections that are probably more than a robo-vacuum can easily handle.

Interesting, that’s not what I’m used to. What sort of transitions are you referring to because these things can get over a half inch hurdle.

There are any number of >1/2" transitions on my ground floor. But, as I say it's a 200+ year old house that has been added to and modified many times. I wasn't going to buy a robo-vac just to find it wasn't very useful. Really it's just my dining room/kitchen that needs to be vacuumed regularly between monthly housekeeper visits and a stick vac handles that in a few minutes.

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