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there are "smart home" things i want, like a breaker panel that texts me when a breaker trips so i don't have to find out about it hours later, or a refrigerator with an ultra-low-power temp logger that lets me know if the fridge dipped into the danger zone during a power outage
neither of these are the least bit sexy. they are incredibly useful, but they aren't toys. so they'll never be made. meanwhile, GE is still trying to get people to spend $4,500 on lightbulbs they can turn off from their phone.
the set of things you can hook an app up to that you can poke and prod at and do shit with as an *activity* is minimal. the real excitement in a smart home is in things you don't notice most of the time, little conveniences.
my new washer and dryer have an app. you can. install laundry programs. i will go so far as to say that's goddamn useless, but, even if we're generous, it's not the first thing that should have been designed and it shouldn't be at the forefront of the marketing?
i had to download a copy of the manual and dig through it to find out that, okay, it can at least supposedly send me a push notification when a load is done. that's cool, I want that - this is the first I've even heard it's available.
of course, i'm not going to set that up, because I know the device is not secure and can never be secure, and I could talk for an hour about how they COULD have designed shit like this so it WOULD be secure, but that's like tenth level pipe dream shit
whereas the thing that's particularly bugging me is that the marketing didn't tell me I could get notified when a load is done, it told me I could *upload new and specialized cycle programs.*
and I just feel like... that's Sexy. that feels like DLC. that sounds like you're getting something, *another* toy, when the device itself is already marketed like a toy and the manufacturers feel like they can't sell anything unless it's a toy!
I think back to my dad buying shit and feverishly showing it off to anyone who would look, making it do the one thing he knew how to do with whatever it was. Christ. That's such a shitty reason to buy anything.
We got the worst future. Everything we have is emphasized on the wrong shit. Smartphones only got cameras so people could be sold more social media shit, then everybody realized at once how much shit becomes 100,000 times easier with a camera always to hand.
