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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

The market for a product that requires the buyer to setup a VPN is not going to be very large. You seriously overestimate the average tech competence of people. It needs to be something you just plug in and it works.

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A) If customers can't manage select a properly secure cloud camera system, what makes you think they're going to do a good job picking a VPN vendor and setting up their product? But perhaps more importantly..

B) What about the apparently huge majority of us that prefer these devices precisely because the video is not stored on-site?

I'm fully capable of all of the technical stuff and have done it before.

It's just a complete pain in the ass. I have a collection of "cool, but painful to maintain" devices.

Raspberry Pis have been sold out forever. There are plenty of competent people buying hardware with the training wheels removed.

Plenty relative to a small absolute number overall - right? I don’t know RPI sales but the difficulty buying them doesn’t signal that loads of average folks want to bother.

I have both RPI local cam set up and Wyze. Despite concerns, hard to argue with pure convenience of Wyze (and similar products)

One of the reasons for them being sold out is a lot of the demand for Raspberry comes from industrial customers. For example, back in 2020, they made up 44% of total Raspberry Pi sales.

Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supporting-raspberry-pis-in...

3.2 million users subscribed to the main raspberry pi subreddit alone. That shows there's a pretty good amount of users for a hardware product like this.

I could, however, imagine you buying a "$BRAND hub" for your "$BRAND camera" and other $BRAND IoT that ostensibly set-ups a tailscale kinda thing you can access via the $BRAND App, all while not touching the cloud.

It's ostensibly the same UX as the current cloud set-up, only without the operational costs of running a cloud service.

> I could, however, imagine you buying a "$BRAND hub" for your "$BRAND camera" and other $BRAND IoT that ostensibly set-ups a tailscale kinda thing you can access via the $BRAND App, all while not touching the cloud.

I'm confused by the use of the word "ostensibly" there. Do you mean that the makers would claim that it would set up a tailscale kinda thing for you while doing something completely different to avoid the cloud?

No, I used "ostensibly" to indicate that it wouldn't nescessarily be Tailscale but some sort of VPN that appears to have a similar UX. Honestly probably not the correct phrasing.

Sorry that it wasn't clear.

cloud camera's aren't that either, most require the download of an app, signing up, configuring the camera, etc.

You could just as easily give local camera's the "printer" treatment, and most people are somehow able to successfully setup printers on their PC's.

Wyze camera setup is pretty straightforward. Add a camera in the app, it opens a QR code on the phone screen, and you just scan that with the Wyze cam. It seems fool-proof.

With that being said, I did still have to setup the Wyze cameras for my 50 year old tech-inclined dad, haha.

I disagree. I submit that you rather underestimate the tech competence of people - humankind have done far more with less resources due to ingenuity.

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