Comment by MichaelZuo 2 days ago
Any vision of the future that doesn’t include realistic incentives of human beings won’t happen.
Offering such a flexible smart home requires a huge amount of coordination work, customer support, and just taking the blame sometimes for the inevitable bugs.
Yeah competent companies are willing to take on all that, if you pay them a lot, which is why high end smart homes are flourishing.
Famously Bill Gates had a practically fully envisioned smart home by the early 2000s. With pretty much every wizmo and integration.
Even superyachts nowadays are starting to see that from what I’ve heard.
He asked for more concrete examples because the professional companies are behind the consumer level products. Home Assistant is one of the biggest projects on GitHub for a reason. It's still stuck in the hobby space but everything they are doing lately is to push it past Apple Home for the regular user.
Are you confused about what early 2000s means?
The ideal integrated smart home was already achieved before smartphones existed.
Recent advancements have mostly been about pushing the original 100 million+ usd cost lower.
What high end smart homes are actually smart in the way paxys described? I would say this market more than just not flourishing, actually doesn’t exist. There’s no company that sells this because it would require a whole bunch of other companies get on board to make it real.
Imagine you go to get your car's tires replaced but can only buy BMW brand (because that's what your car will support) and they cost 3x the price of the generic ones.
Imagine you want to do some home renovations but the builder of your house has installed a kill switch that will detonate the entire thing to the ground should you try to move even one brick without using their preferred contractor.
Imagine the manufacturer of your couch shows up to your doorstep 2 years after you bought it and says they need it back. But you paid full price for it? Nope, you actually bought a license, and the license has now expired. So will you get a refund? Lol, nope.
All of this would be laughable in the real world, yet when it comes to tech we look at the same practices and go "of course, all this makes sense".
So no, this isn't really about the "huge amount of work" it would entail. Companies are perfectly capable of doing this work, and happily do so as long as it benefits them. The problem is that there is no regulation in the space and customers have been trained to accept these practices as a way of life.
> competent companies are willing to take on all that, if you pay them a lot, which is why high end smart homes are flourishing.
Citations needed, I can provide a lot of examples of high end equipment providing a worse experience.