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I'm renting an apartment that came with a "nest" smoke detector. The thing ate through around 8 AA batteries every few months. We finally got sick of it and bought our own dumb 10€ smoke / CO detector.

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If something like that is going to chew through batteries, it should be available as hardwired only, with batteries as the backup. But I know the manufacturers wouldn't want to miss out on the juicy market of people who don't want to deal with running the wires and who don't realize how often they're going to be replacing batteries until it's too late to return the device.

I agree. I think my anecdote illustrates the perversions of the renter's market, and the interaction with the Internet of Crap, more than it illustrates the IoC in general. A lot of people buy into this stuff and never realize it: they put it in their tenant's home and forget about it.

I'm not complaining about the package I got with the rental: like any packaged service you have to take the good with the bad. But when things are packaged, a lot of the bad wasn't up to the consumer.

You were no doubt using the wrong batteries. Lithium AA batteries come with the alarm and last about 5 years.

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