Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15

Logitech's interest in the smart home has appeared to wane in recent years.

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[Aurich]

The larger issue with IoT and Smart Home devices is that they literally all have to connect to a server to work. Now, most people can't roll their own servers for various reasons, so the manufacturers mostly made their servers available, not really thinking about the long-term costs.

After all, paying a fee to be able to turn on your fucking lights won't set well with MOST consumers.

So they lost money over time and realized Smart Home devises were a dumb financial move.

But not before selling millions of them and then turning them into e-waste.

I used to be a huge Logitech fan, but they priced themselves out of my keyboard market, and their mice died too quickly and their prices got ridiculous as well.

I wonder if we'll ever return to the notion that "enough is enough" and will stop caving to the idea that everyone must maximize profits and reduce costs since that seems to inevitably lead to more waste and ill will.

On the bright side, it will also accelerate climate change and all those wealthy fucks' islands will be flooded out, so there IS a bright spot to it all, even if most of us won't be around to see it.

I don't actually agree with "most people can't roll their own servers for various reasons".

It's easier than ever. Anyone who's technically savvy enough to even think of smart home devices in the first place can have a server.

They might think they can't, but that's an education problem, not an ability problem.

 

[Aurich]

An Ars article on how to do this would be nice. I'm sure there are 17000 YouTube videos on this, but to have an expert curate for me what actually works for a beginner would be good.

I'm competent with PCs, but when trying to walk through the mountain ranges of networks / Linux / soldering or circuit boards I get badly lost in the foothills.

Statements like "All smart devices in my home are Matter over Thread, controlled by Home Assistant." assume that I have any idea on how to set any of those up. I'm sure I could learn, but I rather work on my photography.

I would love to see such an article!

It's not my expertise. I've never used Home Assistant. I am building a server right now, and I'm pretty deep down the rabbit hole of other specific features.

What I do know is it's never been easier to spin up a server though. Often it's as simple as writing a file to a USB stick and plugging it in as your boot drive.

And that's not even counting buying an off the shelf NAS that can serve as your server. Here's a guide I just looked up, can't vouch for it, but it serves I think as an example of what the steps look like:

https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-home-assistant-on-your-ugreen-nas/

I don't think that looks hard for anyone remotely technical.