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Comment by hot_cereal | Hacker News Reader

Amongst the other examples, IoT. 10 years ago it was still in its infancy. As an example, Amazon didn't acquire Ring until 2018. beyond just smart home stuff, payments like Apple and Android Pay impact daily life. The EV boom is also a massive part of IoT. Every TV is now a smart TV (which is miserable, but that's a whole other discussion)

And an IoT world has nearly as many drawbacks as it does benefits, but I think it's hard to argue it hasn't changed the way we interact with the internet in our day to day lives.

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I don't think the things you're referring to have had nearly the impact you're claiming they had. They've just taken things we already had and made them slightly more convenient.

Ring is just doorbell cameras. Japan has had these for decades. Smart home is a complete failure, nobody uses Alexa or siri or ok google seriously. EVs are just cars but slightly different. Smart TVs just simplify the process of having to buy a Chromecast or plug in a laptop to your TV.

Also the new things are objectively worse for the customers than the old things were. Ring's improvement over doorbell cameras is video quality. Smart TVs may simplify the process of having to buy and plug a Chromecast, but you buy and plug a Chromecast specifically to avoid all the bullshit and planned obsolescence that Smart TVs come with. Etc.

If you take a true assessment of all these things, you find that for lots of people the Ring doorbell is just a doorbell now, the video part is ignored; the smart home stuff is just a light switch, and the smart TV is configured enough to get to YouTube or whatever.

People, especially tech-types, way over-estimate how much hassle we're willing to put up with day-to-day.

> People, especially tech-types, way over-estimate how much hassle we're willing to put up with day-to-day.

They also just as often underestimate it. It's part of why "data driven development" fails. Regular, non-tech users have long been conditioned to assume computers and tech in general is buggy, finicky, and full of annoyances. They use it anyway, and bear the frustration silently[0], only occasionally begging a techie relative or friend to "fix my computer, it's slow now because it got viruses". Devs and PMs look at their telemetry, see users using a feature, and think they like it. They probably don't. They just suffer through it.

As a techie, I have very little tolerance for hassle. Which for IoT, ironically, means I'm running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi now, because it's a net save on annoyances - even though it's extra work, it lets me and my family use the "smart" parts of home appliances without frustration.

[0] - With who knows how much accumulating "death from thousand papercuts" psychological damage...

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