I didn’t think people really expected to believe that their smart stuff was really theirs. Did they? Imagine renting your bulbs to Amazon.
Yeah nah, not gonna pay for that
With Sonos shitting the bed with its app update and now the prospect of Alexa being destroyed by fees and AI, my smart home infrastructure is falling apart. So disappointing.
This is why I went with HomeKit devices. I do not understand why people trust Amazon or Google, their business models are not pro-consumer.
If Apple pulled at one of the maneuvers these two have, there would be a flood of articles condemning them. No one expects Amazon or Google to respect you.
It’s hilarious you think Apple is in any way pro-consumer. Apple is all about their walled gardens, but they’re a trap. Their entire business model is designed to use various underhanded means to entice you into their ecosystem and at every step make it increasingly difficult to escape it all so that they can keep extracting money from you. Google and Microsoft aren’t much better but they are better ironically because they’re not as good at disguising their bait and traps as Apple is.
Yes. I understand the people who don’t use Apple products think they are smarter than those who do. Your list of common tropes is tiresome.
The reality is quite far from what you imagine. People who actually understand technology, people who are in the tech industry use Apple products at a higher rather than those who are not.
Instead of Apples well thought out walled garden, fools happily pay extra to play in Google/Amazon/Microsofts chain linked dirt pit. It’s hilarious what lengths people go to pretend that is a better experience; that rusty chain link with barbed wire is superior to walls
I mean yeah. The only reason anyone is surprised when apple pulls shit like this is because they’re aggressively anti-consumer in their pricing and hardware design (parts pairing, poor reparability, etc.). People assume because they’re so flagrantly anti-consumer with their hardware, they can afford to not be so anti-consumer with their software. This is wrong, of course. They’re a publicly traded company, they’ll milk their users for every cent they can.
It’s why I’ve avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.
My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.
I don’t have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only ‘subscription’ associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you’d like. Absolutely zero regrets.
Are you using microphones or is it entirely app based? And if so what microphones are you using?
Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.
Source: I worked on some of it.
Never use anything that depends on the Internet for your smart home. There are entirely offline text to speech and voice recognition plugins/libraries for home assistant.
Yeah I learned this lesson by starting with Smartthings and grew to hate the lack of reliability pretty quickly. Home Assistant and a raspberry pi has been significantly better.
Home Assistant is a great alternative. It gets better and better as all Google and Alexa get worse and worse.
Why the downvotes? this is a legitimate good question as there are many available and people may have important experiences to share. Looking to set up my own someday (hopefully soon) and am interested in what has worked well for people as well.
Just what the cash-strapped people of the world want - more monthly fees.
Looks like companies are shifting to charging users whose data they are stealing.
The saying ‘if you aren’t the customer, you are the product’ is outdated. Now you are the customer and the product!
Windows has done this for ages now. Buying a laptop, you pay well over $100 for the windows license alone, yet it is the most egregious operating system when it comes to datamining the user.
And for something that is already data-mining you. Adding a fee just adds insult to injury.
Yeah, I think that’s the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this “overhual” is indicating is that they haven’t quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.
The only thing I’m reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I’m going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google’s thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that’s out there. And I have a good feeling they’ll look at this collapse as “well the technology just isn’t a good money maker.” No you idiots, it’s not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn’t mean that the technology is a failure.
But it’s whatever, Amazon’s ship to wreck.
Looks like I’ll be selling the few Amazon Alexa-centric devices I’ve got.
