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by XorNot
3936 days ago
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Consumer IoT is too expensive, not useless. Everything it can't do is a metric of the fact that computing on that scale actually isn't cheap enough. Light control for example: people don't want to spend the $thousands it would cost to make it practical (i.e. every light in your house control) when the most common use-case it would solve is leaving your house and going "oh, I left the lights on - but click!". That's worth maybe $10 a light to me, not $70. Which in turn implies the wi-fi, compute and power has to cost cents, not dollars in the product. |
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I would be extremely happy to shed out 70$ for a way to turn off the lights when I forget them (cynically, I'd say especially if it lasts long enough to save me 70$ in electricity bills, but I'm sure a reasonably convincing argument can be made about the environment, additional comfort and so on).
The problem is that virtually every available offering right now attempts to do a lot more than that to justify the 70$ price tag.
It also does it disastrously bad, and without any meaningful integration behind a single manufacturer's product range (there are few things more hilarious than looking at a bunch of Z-Wave or Zigbee devices from different manufacturers trying to talk to each other).
Instead of giving me a simple on-off gizmo, I get a crawling smartphone app that needs a frickin' cloud infrastructure behind it and pushes HTTP notifications to something that could literally be made out of a dozen transistors if it didn't need to talk HTTP (or at least out of a cheap-ass microcontroller with a dumb hardware PHY, but because IPv4 won't fucking die already we either need to make them talk HTTP or have people toy with their routers). When I get downstairs and notice the lights are still on, it takes me less time to find my keys, run back upstairs, fix me a glass of Old Fashioned, gulp it, go back downstairs, notice I forgot why I went up in the first place, so go back up again and turn off the light, than it takes me to open the fucking application, wait for the authentication messages to go back and forth between me, the lights that are literally five meters away from me and some datacenter in frickin' Texas, and turn off the light after I finally get to the relevant stupid dashboard that seemingly shows every possible control in the world except for the on/off button.
All because -- if all it did was shown an on/off button -- it would seem way too expensive.
It's bitterly impossible not to remark that everyone seems to try putting out the fire with the sword. The whole tech stack is currently way too complex and burdening to manufacture these things cheaply. The logic thing to do would be to make it leaner. Yet instead, everyone seems to be trying to get chips to talk JavaScript now.