[Gpetrium]

You are looking at IoT the same way some folks looked at the internet and smartphone at its inception. Demographics will change and so will the perception of people. It is possible that IoT will help refrigerators be less energy intensive depending on the produce inside, that heaters in cars and homes will turn on only when a family member is arriving at home, that food will be heated before you arrive home. The list of possibilities go on and on. The individual/companies will have to decide the amount they will trade for the IoT benefits they get.

[darkpuma]

When I come home, I can have food heated up for me already. It's called a slow cooker. I don't need a 5G radio in my slow cooker for that to work. And what a 5G radio can't do is get the meat balls out of my freezer and into that slow cooker. Similarly thermostats on timers are older than cell phones.

If you want an automatically adjusting fridge, that can and should be implemented without the cell radio too. Put a RFID chips in food packaging that requests a particular temperature; the fridge then sets itself to the lowest temperature requested. A fridge that instead broadcasts the contents of your fridge to some corporation that does not have your best interests at heart is an abomination, but I do not doubt that whichever corporation starts selling them will try to mask this by framing their spy devices as ecologically friendly to make it seem morally unassailable.

[anfilt]

Agreed. Honestly, I don't understand the 5G hype. Moreover, if a device has an embedded transceiver I don't control the network it's connected too. I literally lose control over the device. Short of shutting it off or damaging the transceiver.

[Izkata]

I already have my laptop ensuring all my lights and a space heater are off when I leave (detected by my phone's bluetooth), just in case I forgot. And this is with extremely simple plug-in outlets.