[innino]

I'm sorry that you found my writing so objectionable.

I wasn't, for the record, advocate that life should be easy in the sense that you seem to be thinking I mean it. Maybe we should distinguish between hard as in unnecessarily complicated and poorly designed, and hard as in challenging. I'm teaching myself how computers work at the moment, I really enjoy it. That's challenging, and I like challenging things. Current smoke alarm design, on the other hand, is not challenging in an enjoyable way. They're poorly designed and annoying, and that's a type of hard that I think anyone really likes.

[ekianjo]

> I'm teaching myself how computers work at the moment, I really enjoy it. That's challenging, and I like challenging things. Current smoke alarm design, on the other hand, is not challenging in an enjoyable way. They're poorly designed and annoying, and that's a type of hard that I think anyone really likes.

That's a type of hard most people don't care about because anyway it's not something they have to worry about every single day of their lives. That's a "LOW INVOLVEMENT" kind of problem. Unless you spend all your living time working on smoke alarms you will rarely have to deal with the inconveniences of their design. There are tons of things like that in life that nobody is bothered enough to fix because it's not really worth the time or the additional investment to fix it. Get over it. I'm pretty sure that even if Nest is a great solution (which it seems to be), it will not appeal to many people unless they price their product at the same range as the usual smoke detectors. If you have to pay twice more or so, it's not disruptive, it's just a premium product only premium-focused people will want to buy. The rest of us will keep living with their crappy smoke detectors and still have a good life nonetheless.

I guess you see my point now ?

[innino]

No, I don't see your point at all. You don't seem to have any point - just anger and empty cynicism. In fact, to me you seem to embody everything bad that I was trying to describe in my original post, so thanks for providing an excellent illustration of one of the worst styles of Hackernews participation.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all that smoke alarms are irrelevant or not relevant enough or whatever it is you seem to be trying to say here. I don't spend my life working on them but I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down. Every single one. I wanted to slap the stupid fucks, but then I realised that hey, most people really are kinda lazy and stupid and you will get nowhere getting angry over that fact, you have to accept that and adapt as best you can.

At the time I imagined something very similar to Nest - an alarm over your oven which turns it off if it detects sudden heat. An alarm which sends me, the property manager, a text if it goes off. An alarm that can distinguish too between "a little smoke" and "a shitload of smoke and heat." I imagined that, and I talked to the local fire service, and they laughed and shrugged and said it'd be great but who's gunna do that.

And now guess what, here's a company that's actually made and prepping to sell something even better than what I thought about. It's a beautiful looking object, for starters. It talks to you in intelligent language - "there's carbon monoxide in the living room". It distinguishes between potentially dangerous and critically dangerous situations. It can send push notifications to your phone when something goes wrong or when batteries are about to go out. It can be silenced with an elegant hand gesture. And it gets better: it lights up a room when it sees you walking through it at night. It can turn off your furnace if CO levels rise, if its connected to Nest's Thermostat. And it will help your Thermostat get smarter about power usage by detecting your activity.

And this is just a version one product. Keep in mind - the name is "Protect", not "Smoke Detector." What's to stop them making v2 smarter, and maybe it can sense when people in a house become panicked and call emergency services? Maybe it detects unusual activity when burglars enter? Whatever - use your imagination - the possibilities are huge. And don't forget, this is only the second product that Nest has produced. And already with two they've made them better together. This is the Internet of Things man. It's happening, and it's going to be massive.

If you're not seeing the breakthrough yet, then I just don't know what to say to you. What, are you angry because they made such a good product? Because they're selling it for a fraction of what it's worth? Because they're smarter than any of the unimaginative companies making crappy smoke alarms we had to put up with up until today? Are you angry because it's "not enough"? Because the whole world's not going to run out and buy this one product tomorrow, and so therefore for some weird reasons we shouldn't bothered being excited about it, because obviously it's gunna go nowhere?

Get over yourself man. The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life. And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious. If the false binary choice you seem to offer is between a chorus of blind praise and your brand of negative bullshit, thanks but no thanks, I'd rather take the former.

[ekianjo]

Hahah. You are the one full of anger because someone has a different opinion than you, it seems. Look, I don't know how to spell it to you if you don't know how to read my post. I mentioned "LOW INVOLVEMENT" in big letters so that I'd hope you would read it, but it seems like I wasted my time.

> I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down

This sentence proved that you are not a regular person who uses only a single or two smoke detectors for their home. So you are not relevant. Almost nobody is like you. I have two smoke detectors and they only triggered once in 7 years living in the same place, and I had no issue whatsoever to stop them. This is probably in line with most people who have LOW INVOLVEMENT with these kind of things. You know, when you only use something like once a year or less?

> The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life.

If you think everyone is going to buy the best of the best in every category of prodcuts and spend all of their cash on things they don't really care about, you are in for a big surprise.

> What, are you angry because they made such a good product?

I'm not angry, I was merely explaining my point of view and I have no idea why you take my view as one of an angry person or something. I found their video nice, they did a good job, I'm just saying it won't change the fact that most people will not care and will not even know about it and keep going on with their business as usual.

> And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious.

Actually you are going to look like the worst kind of asshole for calling me names while I have never attacked you personally. That's ad hominem at best and frankly this is not surprising for someone who makes blanket statements about everything.

Cheers.

[innino]

I'm sorry if I lost my temper, I've tried to understand your position here and respond calmly and reasonably to you but clearly I've failed.