Not surprised. I’ve seen a lot of the smart home platforms sold to consumers use shitty proprietary apps. I would never buy them, and I feel bad for those who do. It doesn’t mean a nice, Home Assistant setup is bad.
Interesting discovery! Looks like someone at the Atlantic saw the original post and asked them to rewrite it as an article. It's also interesting seeing the change in style when it goes from blog post to serious-media article.
When my parents built a new house, they wanted to get smart home features and got quoted 12k CHF (pretty much same as USD) for a crappy proprietary system.
I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.
The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.
Hype-based ones like what's described in the original blog post are a nightmare. And I don't even need to pull the privacy card; the UX is already daunting enough.
A good benchmark I have is my wife, who didn't grow messing around with computers and a tinkerer's mindset: if she's taking more than a couple of tries or days to tinker and start living with something new, I need either to prep a better backup plan, or to cut it off. Very specialized stuff (like light bulb colors) are still too expensive to have more manual-like controls, but almost everything toggleable should have something one can press.
The cost of these systems and the lack of features/control are both shocking. You can't configure anything on your own, you need a tech to come out to make the smallest change and they will try to upsell you. The contractor companies for control4 come and go and so even if you bought a upgrade ($10K+ price tag on a system not 4 years old) a few years ago, the new contractor wants to get paid somehow.
For the cost a relative spent on an upgrade I could have replaced all the smart tech in my house with the best (IMHO) and come in at well under that number.
Home Assistant still has some rough edges for non-tech people but it's amazing and I'd build a HA + Z-Wave/Zigbee system out of pocket before I'd accept a free Control4 system.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] threadBut they’re right about the setup costs
https://world.hey.com/jason/the-big-regression-da7fc60d
I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.
The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.
A good benchmark I have is my wife, who didn't grow messing around with computers and a tinkerer's mindset: if she's taking more than a couple of tries or days to tinker and start living with something new, I need either to prep a better backup plan, or to cut it off. Very specialized stuff (like light bulb colors) are still too expensive to have more manual-like controls, but almost everything toggleable should have something one can press.
No need to say more.
The cost of these systems and the lack of features/control are both shocking. You can't configure anything on your own, you need a tech to come out to make the smallest change and they will try to upsell you. The contractor companies for control4 come and go and so even if you bought a upgrade ($10K+ price tag on a system not 4 years old) a few years ago, the new contractor wants to get paid somehow.
For the cost a relative spent on an upgrade I could have replaced all the smart tech in my house with the best (IMHO) and come in at well under that number.
Home Assistant still has some rough edges for non-tech people but it's amazing and I'd build a HA + Z-Wave/Zigbee system out of pocket before I'd accept a free Control4 system.