Someone put a lot of effort into designing that system. Then it was basically forgotten.
Then it was resurrected in partially zombified form as Shortcuts - and forgotten again.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/17/mac-user-automation-sal-sogho...
Sal Soghoian, the man who headed up user automation tools at Apple – including AppleScript and Automator – says that he left the company last month when Apple eliminated his position ‘for business reasons.’ … The decision to lose Soghoian after almost 20 years in the role, together with a statement that makes the future of user automation tools seem uncertain, is bound to cause concern among those of us who depend on them on a daily basis. The fear will be that Apple may gradually cease support for power tools as part of an increasing consumer focus.
- wall mounted 6" screen + voice control
- iPad on robotic arm
- FaceID door locks
- security cameras
So you add your automation crap to HA, scan a QR code from HA and everything pops up in HomeKit
For me that was a bit oof, as it literally adds _everything_. So I just use Apple TV as a HomeKit hub with the basic stuff added directly to it and a few specific devices (Shelly) bridged from HA using a whitelist.
This way the WAF stays high and Siri works properly.
HA still does the more complicated stuff (ATV is on pause -> make lights in the TV are a bit brighter. ATV playing -> dim the lights according to the time of day etc.
It was somewhat recently that I read something about what I’ve also felt personally, that people haven’t really warmed up to the whole home automation idea. At least speaking for my own feelings about it, it’s largely because it’s unreasonably expensive for most people, an unreasonably challenging task to set up even with perfect conditions of a single company’s products, unreasonable complexity that introduces unreasonable brittleness, and an unreasonable mental load on having yet another complex, brittle thing to have to manage. It’s the antithesis of what Apple stood for at a time.
Apple succeeded because it abstracted having to be an engineer to do things. It’s why so many engineers hate Apple because of the “walled garden” and are smitten with Linux and Android because you can accomplish the same thing in 1000 ways, but none of them frictionless or even clearly, simply and consistently documented. It’s something the engineer minded don’t seem to commonly understand, people don’t want to be engineers like you to live their lives. You go to a restaurant so you don’t have to cook, not because you have to make 1000 decisions before you even get any food, it’s why I eventually switched to iOS when I did, and it was honestly a kind of weight off my shoulders because I had gotten tired of the self-centered maybe even narcissistic nature of things like Linux and Android.
Maybe a measure of business and product success should be the rankings of how easy it is to explain it to your Nanna and her using it … Nanna Arena, anyone?
But even if Apple can inject its famous “just works” magic into home automation, it is combatting its own entropy that has been slowly introducing bugs, glitches, and brittleness over the years. Does anyone feel like calling for Siri 8 times and being ignored before having to hold a button or simply just do it manually in frustration, with a system that costs $10,000 just to turn on your lights?
This is the company that charges $1000 for a monitor stand that is a piece of aluminum, I can’t even imagine the price of a 6” wall mounted screen, let alone an Apple robotic iPad arm. Not to mention it seems unlikely to me considering Apple’s abandonment of things like AirPort and the fumbled HomePods.
It all just feels like a typical recent core nature of Apple, too late to the wrong party because the company has been not just taken over, but overtaken by people who want to ride a wave to feel good rather than do good effective work.
But that’s just me. Does anything I’ve said resonate with anyone else? I get hints and glimpses of it here and there when I can tell myself, “I guess I’m not just imagining it”, and maybe something is very off at Apple.
We're smitten with these systems because they do everything that Apple does easier and because they do useful things that Apple doesn't let you do at all.
Also, I have been noticing more AI-generated slop comments on this discussion board.