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by hs586 187 days ago
Tangential rant: It’s becoming hard to buy dumb appliances.

I was looking at robot vacuums, and most need internet connection at least for setup - by which point it’s already uploaded your floor plan and who knows what to the cloud.

3 comments

https://valetudo.cloud/

The project was recently discussed on HN as well. It has its issues but it works.

Not sure that’s a great example when you can easily buy a regular vacuum. Robot vacuums are sort of by definition already the “smart appliance” version of the “dumb appliance regular vacuum”.
I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The technology allows for robot vacuums to exist and I don’t see the cloud connection as a mandatory need for it. Similarly, I want my car to have say lane assist but we don’t expect to have cloud connection with it.
That's a fair point. It's frustrating that practically every "smart" anything these days needs a cloud connection (and probably also an app) just to work when they could easily work offline.
We got one this year. "Setup" meant pairing with our devices plus the account we had to create with the manufacturer. It didn't map the place until after that. I assume they all work this way.