"Dumb" home devices work as expected for 25-50 years, and then you replace them.
"Smart" home devices work as expected for about a year and then they fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them.
replies(8):
"Smart" home devices work as expected for about a year and then they fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them.
> "Smart Local Control" home devices work as expected until the electronics fail
ftfy.
Also, that posts says the thermostat will still work locally so the failure state of the "smart" device here is that it became a "dumb" device after a decade+.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Nest#Nest_Learning_Ther...
Curious to hear what local polling or local push thermostat you settled on with HA support!
Release years aren’t purchase years.
Everyone didn’t have the same purchase year.
And, it’s just a thermostat. When they first came out it was a little novel. Not anymore.
Temperature is a solved problem and algorithm.
There’s no real reason to discontinue them - they do the same thing they always have, connected to the same shared infrastructure.
I highly doubt the cost of cloud, tech increased or decreased since then.
It feels like a form of forced planned obsolescence. Maybe some growth or product folks not hitting their bonus lol.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 were unique also don’t have microphones in them. I know Gen 2 handled microbursting well not sure about other gens.
The truth is the cloud is someone else’s computer and the cloud always costs someone else, if not the customer.
Maybe nests aren’t being replaced fast enough or new nest purchases aren’t growing like before due to other options.
I won’t trust or buy any more Nest devices again or trust the brand. I buy newer Nest devices and cycle them out.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 folks were early adopters and they can find more elsewhere.
There are lots of other better options.
It’s easy to go early adopt the next thing. Home automation has come a long way and those who are trying to earn in the past risk being left in the past.
The device will work locally but api is being removed so the mobile app won’t work and neither will any home automation integrations.
The least they could do is just let people control it directly. We’ll see if it gets unlocked now.
EDIT: That comment was heavily expanded after I replied. It was originally only about the distinction of purchase date. I won't debate the rest of the comment because as I said at the start, "While I agree with the message...". I just don't think this specific case is a particularly good example of what is being argued and therefore arguing it is probably counterproductive.
A shortcut however is checking out the homelab subreddit. People will post about the gear they are using in their stack.
1. That you can buy a smart local control device.
2. That the electronics were designed with appropriate thermal management so they don't fry themselves quickly. Smart bulbs are the most notorious offenders here, but the problem is widespread.
The first thing I did when I bought my house was remove the Ring camera, but I left the keycode entry for the front door in place. Long story short, a few months later it locked me out of the house and shortly after I replaced it with a regular lock and key. Never again.
It will probably last over a century.
* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.
One device is a pain. When you have a smart fridge, dishwasher, sonos, doorbell, smart lock, etc: the mean time to corporate abandonment gets very short.
I have an Ecobee, and for sure I’m looking to get off of that ecosystem once I’m forced to.
It also feels like Ecobee is an abandoned project at this stage: I get a 500 error trying to get a dev token, and portions of the app have been broken the entire time I’ve had one (9 years, 2 devices).
Thermostats generally last a lot longer than that.
Most of these Nest units continue to work perfectly well and could continue operating with a simple cloud service for many years.
Recently one of my Zigbee-controlled thermostats started pumping cold air constantly. To fix it, all I had to do was open and examine the board; one of the varistors got some battery acid on it when I had an alkaline battery burst in the unit. Because it was a no-name with an actual PCB, I was able to solder a new varistor in place, and it works good as new.
So I would say that "Smart Local Control" isn't the problem, but rather the ability to repair the thing. Also, the thermostat was $45 when I purchased it 5 years ago, so it was a good investment IMO. I think that's why everyone is upset about the Nest gen 1 and 2 sunsetting; there should be no reason that these devices should be breaking now (no failing electronics) but they die anyway because the company is too cheap to keep an extra endpoint running.
Source: I own one. :)
That’s no excuse for Google arbitrarily disabling functionality.
Imagine if a company disabled your freezer after 10 years and told you “hey a refrigerator and freezer that reverts to a refrigerator after 10 years is better than a refrigerator!”
Future generations deserve better.
I’ve seen house thermostats that were so old they were starting to embrittle from ozone and UV damage. That’s more like 40+ years.
Also as someone else pointed out, the Nests are typically at least 2-3 times the cost of a normal thermostat. True, they eventually pay for themselves, but that money still went to Nest instead of PG&E.
And is actively trying to prevent hackers from running stuff locally.
Sounds like Nest/Google didn’t think about that when they priced their products. That’s not the consumer’s fault. I’ve been de-Google-ing myself over the past couple of years and this is the final nail in the coffin. They could have given a partial refund, instead they insult customers with a “discount”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1k97rv0/hack_a_nes...
Then they couldn't resist fiddling with the UI. Every new update changed the UI such that I had to relearn how to operate it.
That was the last straw, so I disconnected it from my wifi and just used it as a standalone thermostat.
How much do you think a server for config files costs? The true cost is very little here. You can make a server host a million thermostat connections for less than a thousand dollars per year. But let's 10x that to be safe, and have a sysadmin dedicate an overkill 1 day per week to keeping the servers happy. And we'll say the sysadmin makes well over median salary and costs $200k to employ.
For 2 million devices, that's $20k a year in server costs and $40k a year in sysadmin. For 50 years, that's 3 million dollars. So it would take a whole... dollar and a half per purchase to fund 50 years of servers.
Making this subscription-based would be fine, as long as I have my choice of providers. Because then I can run it myself on a raspberry pi or pay a big host a few dollars a year to handle my entire household of devices.
