this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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How long have people been trying to make smart homes a thing? I feel like this would have happened by now if there was a real mass market for them. It’s not like there is a huge technological impediment to achieving that vision, like there is for VR/AR. In other ways it’s just like VR, a cool idea that’s been around forever, but doesn’t seem to have widespread application or demand.
If apple is really working on this, I consider it further evidence that they are really really struggling to have a substantive vision of the future. Other than incremental improvement of existing products and financially beneficial business maneuvers, what have they done in the last decade other than try to grasp at old sci-fi notions of ‘the future’. I suspect that this can’t change until they get new leadership. Of course, they’ve largely achieved escape velocity in terms of revenue, and are so established now that the money machine will keep working for a long time, independent of any need to be actually visionary.
The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren't enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.
And, of course, one of Apple's biggest strengths is that they've built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.
Right now you've either got 14 apps for different shit, or you've built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I've gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.
It's a shit experience, still, because it's a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can't stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.
I wouldn't bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.
That's really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.
With the new Matter/Thread standard, we may finally have a unified market where everything works together, and Apple is one of the sponsors of that. With Apple, Amazon and Google all supporting it and adding it to their devices, there’s too huge an already established base to ignore. Of course it’s rolling out frustratingly slowly, but something like this could be the sark that ignites it
I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards…
Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.
I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.
I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.
One of the reasons the rollout has gone so slowly is device profiles. Imagine a committee of every company that makes or wants to make a certain type of device, having to come to a consensus about supported functionality. Sounds like a nightmare, sounds like things will get stuck for years (and they have) …. But now we’ve had several releases of device profiles defining how most basic device types should act.
When I read about this, I became much more optimistic about Matter/Thread. This is a big deal and I don’t know why there aren’t more articles about it
Good to know. Thanks for the insight!