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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Apple has historical been good at taking things that are "good ideas but everyone is doing the execution so badly they haven't really caught on" into the "everyone uses it all the time" category (eg ipod, iphone, airpods). Certainly smart home stuff is kinda in the first category right now, like you said. Perhaps they believe they can give them the same treatment? It seems kinda plausible to me: there's no reason smart home stuff couldn't be a really good, seamless experience.

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Is it actually a good idea, though? It's crystal clear why companies would want to make and sell smart home devices which get customers locked into proprietary web services, but the problems these gadgets are meant to solve for the user have always struck me as... trivial. The last thing I want in my house are more fussy, flaky widgets to manage; they'd better have a really good reason to exist.

Apple and everyone else has agree to Matter.

But no one is going to buy an Apple home device if they aren’t already in the Apple ecosystem.

Besides, Amazon, Google and even Apple services are all cross platform. While there isn’t an iCloud app for Android, there is one for Windows.

If apple would make them less fussy, flaky and maybe let them just work without you managing them - would this already a good reason to exist?

I think this is something apple done right in the past. Like holding your new AirPods just beside your phone and the phone recognizes them.

That would certainly remove a significant obstacle, but my question is really more about whether the problems smart-home devices purport to solve actually matter enough to be worth inventing and buying this much new technology.

My vote is no. I can imagine no smart device that is easier and less troublesome than simple wall switches for my lights and a simple thermostat for my heating and cooling. The less technology the better in one’s home. It’s not conducive to a serene environment.

Something’s are pretty handy, like I go on vacation and forgot to turn off the heater/light. Open an app, click „off“, done. Yes, it might be an inconvenience if they are on for two weeks, but it could be also dangerous. Certain electronic devices still plugged in can cause fires. And yes, this might not count as „smart“ in the sense that it’s more „connected“.

Other scenario what would be nice is restocking. Fridge/kitchen cabinet „notice“ that something is running low and reminds me if I wanna put it on a shopping list. And again, yes it’s a small inconvenience if I return from the grocery store after work and open the fridge to see that I forgot milk. But I think that’s what’s technology is about: taking away inconveniences so we can focus on more important things.

The example with going on vacation is something I really enjoy because it’s removing some friction to „just go“ for me. Before I always took pictures of rooms, heater, power sockets etc before leaving because evertime I arrived a the hotel I thought „did I turnoff x? Did I locked the door?“. Now I just open an app and see if everything is fine and don’t worry the whole vacation.

Anything more than air, water, shelter, food, and companionship is trivial.

I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.

So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.

When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.

When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.

One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.

Triviality. Beautiful, glorious, triviality.

I love it.

Thanks for sharing that perspective; that's exactly what I was curious about.

agree with this completely. the goal (and maybe this is what Apple can do) is make this possible for everyone, not just clever motivated people. I think it takes more leadership than the industry has mustered.

(And maybe their successors can also make it cheap...)

We tried the, "One company makes everything in your house," thing in the mid-century, and it didn't work. A home is an ecosystem - not the corpo buzzword that actually means "walled garden", but an actual ecosystem, with a diverse set of (often competing) "organisms" coexisting. An average room needs seating, storage, entertainment, and its contents are highly influenced by culture, lifestyle, memory, family, desire/ambition. Smart home products have become better over time as manufacturers realized that any given room is going to be a chaotic mix of other manufacturers' products, including those of competitors, and that the only way for the entire ecosystem to succeed is for all of the parts to play as nice together with each other as possible.

I feel like this is one of Apple's weaknesses. The AVP was a massive indication that they're not ready for that kind of paradigm, because even within their own product, apps (organisms) that should have been able to exist as complete digital "objects" and interact with others were instead siloed off experiences that took over the whole device.

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