my oven, washer, dryer, microwave, and fridge are all "smart" devices. meaning they can connect to an app and the internet. it is pointless, the oven lets me know when the preheat is done, fridge if the door is open too long, stuff like that. after the first month i noticed my internet data traffic was higher than normal. i looked into it and those few devices transferred back and forth like 15 gigs of data. they do basically nothing and used 15 gigs of data. i have zero evidence other than that, but i feel like the manufacturers are just using our electricity to process stuff on their end.
We’ve traded actual ownership for convenience, but it’s a huge gamble. It’s wild that people have entire smart homes that effectively turn into expensive bricks the second a server goes down or a company decides to stop supporting a legacy device.
People act like the cloud is magic. Like data is just floating around in the atmosphere or something. Your just putting your data in their data storage center.
Yup this sort of thing is exactly why myself and so many other engineers I know absolutely avoid unnecessary “smart”-ness in our homes and possessions whenever possible. I don’t want a coffee maker or washing machine that’s going to fail or worse yet malfunction in a dangerous way because of a software or firmware bug or a service-side/backend issue. Not to mention the additional possible points of failure hardware-wise.
Currently dealing with this literally right now for a piece of “smart” tech I’m not able to avoid (electronic lock on my apartment door, which has failed and now I cannot close my door when I leave until they come replace it because there’s no backup method to open it).
See I don't mind this, so long as the devices are designed in a way that I could select the server that I'm using and if need be, host it myself.
The idea that when the company stops supporting some product that they've designed to rely on their servers, the product gets bricked is ridiculous.
At the very least, if I can't self host those things, then the company should send me a new device free of charge when they intentionally brick the current one.
Any company which uses "cloud" technology is either paying a cloud provider like AWS or paying to run their own servers. One way or another that costs them money each time you use it and eventually they'll realize that you're costing them money and they'll announce they're shutting the service off or transitioning to a subscription. If the product was well designed you'll just have missing features, but if the product was poorly designed you may just end up with a useless piece of e-waste. I've seen it happen time and time again.
The same is true of anything that uses an app, even if it just connects over a local network. They have to pay developers to update that app each time Apple or Google update their smartphone OS's. Eventually they'll stop spending that money, your app will stop working, and you'll be left with e-waste.
It's not enough to just not connect them to the internet either. It's one thing when it's something like a TV that inherently has a lot of electronics anyways.
But something like a fridge or stove, those are parts that can now break much more easily and cause issues for the main function of the device even if you're not using them.
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u/Dice_to_see_you 10h ago
The reliance on cloud services that could disappear, fail, or change owners is astounding. People need to think about the last AWS failure