Metriacanthosaurus

Hoping against hope for some big improvements to HomeKit itself come iOS 13. (aside: this is perhaps the only SDK from Apple where the name of the SDK has somehow become the marketing term?).

HomeKit is probably the least common smart home automation service on the market, and much like the Smart Speaker/Smart Assistant market... the Smart Home Automation market is not waiting for Apple to get its shit together. Products are churning out at a feverish pace without any support for Apple's Home automation SDK that was supposed to provide Apple customers with a secure and easy-to-use Smart Home experience.

That is the reason Apple provides SDK's to begin with. It is the thought process of: We know 3rd parties will be making products that our customers will be buying...we want to inject our security and ease-of-use into those products so that our customers are cared for.

But it doesn't matter when they can't get their SDK adopted because it is too complicated/too restricted. Companies will just go with Alexa instead, and it will work, and customers will be mostly happy with the experience, and no one will care if its not as secure or feature-rich as it could be.

CheeseFreeze said:

If HomeKit or HomeKit device can’t be setup by my non-tech (grand)parents, it is a failure. 

I don't agree about the setup part at all. If your non-tech grandparents aren't capable of installing a simple light switch from HomeDepot, than they're not going to install a Lutron Caseta light switch either. Further, if they don't understand how to add devices using the Lutron app, or the Home app, that is no failing of any product. It requires a modicum of tech know-how to setup, and this is to be expected.

This logic should be applied to the operation part, absolutely. Once it is setup, it should work as reliably and as intuitively as any non-smart counterpart. When you have devices that go unresponsive, need to be reset, or re-setup from scratch they are non-starters. Many smart home products have suffered this, because they've shipped long before the majority of bugs were worked out.

It really doesn’t make any sense that anyone should have this problem to begin with. If you have wall switches, you have no business using Philips Hue. There are several far more appropriate ways to achieve smart home lighting without nuking a useful wall switch. 

normm said:

knowitall said:

Climate change, thats a tautology.

He's talking about anthropogenic climate change, which gets harder and more expensive to deal-with the longer we ignore it.  The economic costs have already been enormous (paid for by us all), and the US military considers this a major risk factor destabilizing the world.

LMFAO. 

Any day now. 

Fascinating to me that some people only pick up on what a joke major media outlets are when a subject hits home.