The oven won't talk to the fridge: 'Smart' homes struggle

Why would anyone want their home controlled and spied on by strangers? And why does any of this have to be connected to anything outside the home? Rhetorical question: it does not and never did, need to be.

At CES, Samsung presented a vision of consumers using its Smart Things app to monitor the chicken in the Samsung oven while watching a Samsung TV that would also tell them when their Samsung washing machine was finishing its cycle.

Big Brother would be overjoyed.

Can a dependable power supply even be guaranteed?

WALL-E here we come.

I don't have any of these pointless gimmicks and I don't plan on having any.

I have an oven and a fridge but I walk the talk.

We have dimmable multicolor smartbulbs, a smart tv, a music system that works natively with Spotify, and heating that works off wifi based thermostats. I see value in all these things, some of which are cheaper than the non-smart way. I could not afford hardwired dimmable lights with mood settings by Lutron etc. That kind of system costs thousands of USD. A stack of CDs containing everything I play on Spotify would cost a fortune and take up a huge amount of space. I have lots of music on vinyl and CD but it sits in another room increasingly untouched.

We do not have a smart toaster or a smart fridge, and I can't imagine them adding much value.

These devices really are not that smart. I gave up with Alexa. It’s actually faster to click on the tv than ask Alexa to do it for you. So basically Alexa is a great voice controlled speaker for music and setting an alarm. Anything else Alexa can potentially do, I’m just too lazy to figure out or don’t care.

I have an oven and a fridge but I walk the talk.

The one got in heated arguments with me while the other always gives me the cold shoulder.

So much for this article.

A lot of these smart products are actually in the business of collecting your personal information - what you eat / drink, listen to, watch etc.

these companies make most of their money from selling this information

How did humans survive this long without such junk...... the mind boggles :-)

Iremember VHS and Beta. I rememberPre-Windows Japanese computers with diferent incompatible versions of DOS and unlike anywhere else ion the world 640kb 5.25 in floppies. Has Japan learnt anything? Will we have Panasonic smart things incompatible with Sony and everyone else? I expect so. I wonder if the Chinese will be more organised.

I also suspect versions sold in Japan may like many cameras refuse to operate in English and oher major languages.

Yet again industry selling you a dream of products you neither need or want for money you can’t afford. The benefit to you is marginal if that much, the benefit to them is huge. As others have said above, you are the product, they are harvesting your data for very profitable resale and you are paying them for the privilege, nice business model!

My first boss Mr. J.J has always told me to keep it simple for a lesser chance of a failure or breaking down. I still believe that to this day, The best design of anything is the most RELIABLE including us humans.

"You can see immediately if you've brushed your teeth properly or if you need to put on sunscreen, for example," says the firm's Baptiste Quiniou.

….

.

And this was said with a straight face?

"The hard part is the app model, the data model, the sharing of this, because the human nature of companies is to be very selfish about this," he said.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the financial liability that’s inherently involved with security breaches or exploits that comes with commonality of software code?

When I search for Bluetooth devices on my iPhone, I see many of my Neighbors devices.... from an Apple Wireless Mouse, through to various TV boxes, and headphones... there's going to come a time, when the point-to-point authentication between these devices can be broken - indeed, if it hasn't already been done so.

If you have a USB Bluetooth adapter, how do you know that it's not code injecting into your OS, in order to take over some functionality ?

As for Samsung - I bought a 5k CNY "3D Smart TV" a number of years ago, it soon stopped allowing access to the Apps, and a couple of years later went dark completely needing to be trashed... Don't trust Samsung anymore as a result.

I'm an analog soul in a digital world.

Perhaps the Toilet should talk to the Kitchen devices ?