[amscanne]

That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me:

1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households.

2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result.

3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX that you'll actually use. That's an amazing value proposition.

[allturtles]

I use the programmable UX on my existing $40 dollar thermostat. It works fine and it's not that hard to use. It only ever requires adjusting when we leave for/return from vacation, and takes ~1 minute to get back into the right state each time.