Meanwhile, old dumb dimmer switches can last for 20 or 30 years or more. "even 20 years"? Lots of gasoline/petrol cars can stay on the road for much longer than that. My father recently had to...
A tiny low-power solid-state microcontroller that is used in a residential IoT gateway -- such as what Lutron has for the Caseta dimmer switches -- should last 10 years, easily
Meanwhile, old dumb dimmer switches can last for 20 or 30 years or more.
Old gasoline cars have expected lifetimes of as much as 10 or even 20 years if properly maintained.
"even 20 years"? Lots of gasoline/petrol cars can stay on the road for much longer than that. My father recently had to junk his 28-year-old car for no other reason than unsafe airbags. When the local BMW dealership came to collect his car, they were amazed at its condition. It was almost better than new - despite my father having driven it for many tens of thousands of kilometres all around Australia. 20 years is a very low estimate for a car's life expectancy.
How did our expectations get so low? How is it that we can buy a device today and expect it to die within 5 or 10 years, when previous versions of the same device had much longer life expectancies? Have we been so conditioned by companies' planned obsolescence and low-quality items that we've stopped demanding long life and high quality from things we buy? I find this sad.
On a personal note... I have a microwave oven that I bought when I moved out on my own in 1989. It still works fine. However, it has developed some rust (of all things) on the inside of the door. I know I need to replace it, but I'm dreading doing so because I know there's no way I'm going to get 30 years' use out of my next microwave oven. I should only expect it to last a few years, because everything is disposable and short-lived these days. And gods help me if I decide to buy a smart oven (hypothetically)! In such a case, I should only expect it to work until next year, when the company decides that whatever operating system it might use is no longer current.
I hate this trend towards short-termism and disposability.
And, integrating software into devices that don't need it, so that their lifespans are artificially shortened even further, is a great boon for companies but a huge drawback for consumers.
Your 30 year old dimmer (leading edge dimmer) won't work well with LEDs. The new ones (trailing edge dimmers) have more advanced circuitry, but will do a better job of dimming modern bulbs. No...
Your 30 year old dimmer (leading edge dimmer) won't work well with LEDs. The new ones (trailing edge dimmers) have more advanced circuitry, but will do a better job of dimming modern bulbs. No clue about that 10 year figure in the article, but it says easily, so it's probably a conservative estimate.
The reason things don't seem to last as long as they used to is two-fold: First, we don't think about all of the unreliable junk that was made 30 years ago, it's all failed several years ago, so we only get the stories about reliable products that stood the test of time. Second, with the prevalence of computers, internet connections, and cloud services backing these devices, they can be shut off by the manufacturer whenever it's no longer advantageous to keep them running.
The problem with Sonos (and a lot of other devices) is that they're taking a dumb thing that should last a long time (amp + speaker) and putting some cloud connected component into it. So long after the device was sold, the company is stuck paying for a cloud backend that has to keep running, and an old CPU that will almost certainly be too slow to run the latest software. Sonos is in a bad spot in that their hardware is still in good shape even 10+ years later, but the processors are simply too old to support the latest software. This is why I don't buy this type of smart device, long term support will cost the company money and they may decide at some point that it's not worth it.
I have some "smart speakers" around my house, but they're made by plugging a chromecast audio into a nice pair of powered speakers. If Chromecast stops working, I'm not out the entire set of speakers, just a $30 component.
Similarly with the TVs, they all have Rokus plugged into them. Roku just had a similar issue where their oldest hardware won't be able to support some Netflix updates, but when that time comes I'll replace those $50 boxes instead of the whole $500 TV.
One comment: Stuff might still work, but might not be power efficient or safe. Just look at the advances in CPU power requirements over the past decade (went from 150W to ~60W) and things like LED...
One comment: Stuff might still work, but might not be power efficient or safe. Just look at the advances in CPU power requirements over the past decade (went from 150W to ~60W) and things like LED lights.
Yes, my grandfather's electric drill from the 1950's still works, but I'm fairly sure it loses half the energy put in as heat and the electrics insulation doesn't look particularly safe either.
Or, be like me, and rent older (cheaper) places. A few years back, I was living in a flat that was built in the late 1960s. Most of the old fittings still worked after 50 years. (The landlord...
Live in the same house for 30 or 40 years and just look around.
Or, be like me, and rent older (cheaper) places. A few years back, I was living in a flat that was built in the late 1960s. Most of the old fittings still worked after 50 years. (The landlord replaced the original wall heater when I moved in - so it had lasted nearly 50 years). The light switches worked, the light sockets worked, the power points worked, the oven worked, etc. And that was a rental property - which is always treated worse than an owner-occupied property.
I think this is the correct approach. I'm using Alexa in my home, and I have an echo dot connected to my speaker system via Bluetooth. Works great, and I can switch out the dot at anytime and I'm...
I think this is the correct approach.
I'm using Alexa in my home, and I have an echo dot connected to my speaker system via Bluetooth. Works great, and I can switch out the dot at anytime and I'm only out $30.
Whenever I think about this subject I can't help but recall the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell's 1984. It's not a perfect comparison (capitalist planned obsolescence vs. perpetual socialist war...
Whenever I think about this subject I can't help but recall the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell's 1984. It's not a perfect comparison (capitalist planned obsolescence vs. perpetual socialist war rationing) but the artificial scarcity everyone's been conditioned to accept is the same.
We should have access to the best technology ever developed. Our products should run cleaner, last longer, and cost less than any prior generations. They have improved in some ways but in others they are markedly worse than comparable items from 50 years ago. When I think about the widening gulf between what we could have, and what we do, I get upset because there's no technical reason for that gulf to exist. It's entirely artificial.
Like the people of Orwell's Oceania, we generally accept this unquestioningly. Of course your microwave only lasts 5 years, but it has Alexa! There are no high-quality alternatives on the market. You'll buy something crappy and disposable, because that's all there is available today. Don't think about it too hard, just smile and be grateful for the prosperity and convenience modernity has brought you.
I don't want to push the analogy too hard; I'd rather have shoddy appliances than actual rationed food and other necessities like in the book. Life is still pretty good, all things considered. I'm just annoyed when it's not even possible to buy a quality product in a given category. I still want that dumb TV but it simply doesn't exist. The lack of options doesn't feel like prosperity to me.
I think something that has ruined a lot of things that used to "last" is the insertion of software everywhere. Remember when cars mostly had compatible slots for aftermarket radios? Then we had...
I think something that has ruined a lot of things that used to "last" is the insertion of software everywhere. Remember when cars mostly had compatible slots for aftermarket radios? Then we had external GPS navigation, then it started to be integrated. No more swapping out the tech in the centre console. Now you need a new car if you want an upgrade, and now many fancy new things have arrived which were never available externally (adaptive cruise control etc). Driving a car even a few years old now means substantial features are missing and can't be acquired after the fact.
Have you ever read Brave New World? I think it's a much more apt comparison in this case, the whole society was engineered to induce demand to match supply, using everything from planned...
Have you ever read Brave New World? I think it's a much more apt comparison in this case, the whole society was engineered to induce demand to match supply, using everything from planned obsolescence to psychological conditioning.
"Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games." He interrupted himself.
Frankly, I think that most IoT devices are horribly designed. If you buy a device that requires connecting to your WiFi network, you are going to run into so many problems. The first of which is...
Frankly, I think that most IoT devices are horribly designed. If you buy a device that requires connecting to your WiFi network, you are going to run into so many problems. The first of which is that WiFi is a moving target that is of high value to hackers. I have owned many gadgets that cannot connect to modern WiFi networks because they only supported older, now broken security protocols. I can assure you that it's going to happen again.
Another problem with these devices is that they use off-the-shelf ARM SoCs; basically the same ones used in low-end phones. That means they are likely depending on the binary blobs from the manufacturer to handle the peripherals they need, which means they are stuck at whatever ancient version of Linux the SoC the manufacturers used when they were still designing the chip, which means that the device manufacturer must either discontinue their products fairly quickly or spend money to deliberately patch known vulnerabilities. And since there are binary blobs, there are also plenty of unknown vulnerabilities.
And that's the core problem with commercial IoT devices; you may own the hardware but you do not own the software. And hardware without software is a brick.
The good news is that there are much more open devices available than the big name ones you read about all the time. For instance, you can buy Sonoff WiFi light switches and easily replace the firmware with an open source replacement or even roll your own if you want to. Looking for a security camera? You can literally build yourself one with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the camera module, and a MicroSD card with some very easy-to-follow guides available online today.
Specifically on the Sonos front I am never buying another product of theirs again, and in general I have stopped buying anything that needs an internet connection to a component that I can't host....
Specifically on the Sonos front I am never buying another product of theirs again, and in general I have stopped buying anything that needs an internet connection to a component that I can't host. I haven't got an answer for everything yet, and on the multiroom audio front it's disappointing to see traditional speaker companies follow Sonos' lead with closed ecosystems. There is no multiroom equivalent of line-in or toslink. There is playfi but it's basically dead as far as I can see.
My next startup after current obligations expire is going to be pluggable multiroom sound and video on published standards. It's not a hard problem. There are multiple DIY solutions already, i.e. SnapCast, it just needs someone to invest in a business around it with some pucks a la chromecast audio (discontinued). Shift the brains onto a server which you could sell too and the pucks at least would be good for the life of the silicon (presumably a DAC + microcontroller + wifi reciever). Publish the protocols and hopefully grow a decently compatible ecosystem.
As far as regulation goes, I'd like to see it made mandatory to include a standard modular connector for all the "smart" bits in any device or system that would otherwise work without them. Not...
As far as regulation goes, I'd like to see it made mandatory to include a standard modular connector for all the "smart" bits in any device or system that would otherwise work without them.
Not enough memory or processor capacity anymore? Replace the module, instead of junking the speakers/car/washing machine/pacemaker...
The carbon emissions and sheer environmental damage from all this disposable crap make it a global imperative to do what can be done to reduce waste, and this would provide the benefits of software without the drawbacks of unnecessary obsolescence.
Meanwhile, old dumb dimmer switches can last for 20 or 30 years or more.
"even 20 years"? Lots of gasoline/petrol cars can stay on the road for much longer than that. My father recently had to junk his 28-year-old car for no other reason than unsafe airbags. When the local BMW dealership came to collect his car, they were amazed at its condition. It was almost better than new - despite my father having driven it for many tens of thousands of kilometres all around Australia. 20 years is a very low estimate for a car's life expectancy.
How did our expectations get so low? How is it that we can buy a device today and expect it to die within 5 or 10 years, when previous versions of the same device had much longer life expectancies? Have we been so conditioned by companies' planned obsolescence and low-quality items that we've stopped demanding long life and high quality from things we buy? I find this sad.
On a personal note... I have a microwave oven that I bought when I moved out on my own in 1989. It still works fine. However, it has developed some rust (of all things) on the inside of the door. I know I need to replace it, but I'm dreading doing so because I know there's no way I'm going to get 30 years' use out of my next microwave oven. I should only expect it to last a few years, because everything is disposable and short-lived these days. And gods help me if I decide to buy a smart oven (hypothetically)! In such a case, I should only expect it to work until next year, when the company decides that whatever operating system it might use is no longer current.
I hate this trend towards short-termism and disposability.
And, integrating software into devices that don't need it, so that their lifespans are artificially shortened even further, is a great boon for companies but a huge drawback for consumers.
Your 30 year old dimmer (leading edge dimmer) won't work well with LEDs. The new ones (trailing edge dimmers) have more advanced circuitry, but will do a better job of dimming modern bulbs. No clue about that 10 year figure in the article, but it says easily, so it's probably a conservative estimate.
The reason things don't seem to last as long as they used to is two-fold: First, we don't think about all of the unreliable junk that was made 30 years ago, it's all failed several years ago, so we only get the stories about reliable products that stood the test of time. Second, with the prevalence of computers, internet connections, and cloud services backing these devices, they can be shut off by the manufacturer whenever it's no longer advantageous to keep them running.
The problem with Sonos (and a lot of other devices) is that they're taking a dumb thing that should last a long time (amp + speaker) and putting some cloud connected component into it. So long after the device was sold, the company is stuck paying for a cloud backend that has to keep running, and an old CPU that will almost certainly be too slow to run the latest software. Sonos is in a bad spot in that their hardware is still in good shape even 10+ years later, but the processors are simply too old to support the latest software. This is why I don't buy this type of smart device, long term support will cost the company money and they may decide at some point that it's not worth it.
I have some "smart speakers" around my house, but they're made by plugging a chromecast audio into a nice pair of powered speakers. If Chromecast stops working, I'm not out the entire set of speakers, just a $30 component.
Similarly with the TVs, they all have Rokus plugged into them. Roku just had a similar issue where their oldest hardware won't be able to support some Netflix updates, but when that time comes I'll replace those $50 boxes instead of the whole $500 TV.
One comment: Stuff might still work, but might not be power efficient or safe. Just look at the advances in CPU power requirements over the past decade (went from 150W to ~60W) and things like LED lights.
Yes, my grandfather's electric drill from the 1950's still works, but I'm fairly sure it loses half the energy put in as heat and the electrics insulation doesn't look particularly safe either.
Or, be like me, and rent older (cheaper) places. A few years back, I was living in a flat that was built in the late 1960s. Most of the old fittings still worked after 50 years. (The landlord replaced the original wall heater when I moved in - so it had lasted nearly 50 years). The light switches worked, the light sockets worked, the power points worked, the oven worked, etc. And that was a rental property - which is always treated worse than an owner-occupied property.
I think this is the correct approach.
I'm using Alexa in my home, and I have an echo dot connected to my speaker system via Bluetooth. Works great, and I can switch out the dot at anytime and I'm only out $30.
Whenever I think about this subject I can't help but recall the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell's 1984. It's not a perfect comparison (capitalist planned obsolescence vs. perpetual socialist war rationing) but the artificial scarcity everyone's been conditioned to accept is the same.
We should have access to the best technology ever developed. Our products should run cleaner, last longer, and cost less than any prior generations. They have improved in some ways but in others they are markedly worse than comparable items from 50 years ago. When I think about the widening gulf between what we could have, and what we do, I get upset because there's no technical reason for that gulf to exist. It's entirely artificial.
Like the people of Orwell's Oceania, we generally accept this unquestioningly. Of course your microwave only lasts 5 years, but it has Alexa! There are no high-quality alternatives on the market. You'll buy something crappy and disposable, because that's all there is available today. Don't think about it too hard, just smile and be grateful for the prosperity and convenience modernity has brought you.
I don't want to push the analogy too hard; I'd rather have shoddy appliances than actual rationed food and other necessities like in the book. Life is still pretty good, all things considered. I'm just annoyed when it's not even possible to buy a quality product in a given category. I still want that dumb TV but it simply doesn't exist. The lack of options doesn't feel like prosperity to me.
I think something that has ruined a lot of things that used to "last" is the insertion of software everywhere. Remember when cars mostly had compatible slots for aftermarket radios? Then we had external GPS navigation, then it started to be integrated. No more swapping out the tech in the centre console. Now you need a new car if you want an upgrade, and now many fancy new things have arrived which were never available externally (adaptive cruise control etc). Driving a car even a few years old now means substantial features are missing and can't be acquired after the fact.
What washing machine did you get? I like to hear about what people have been using that works for them.
Have you ever read Brave New World? I think it's a much more apt comparison in this case, the whole society was engineered to induce demand to match supply, using everything from planned obsolescence to psychological conditioning.
Frankly, I think that most IoT devices are horribly designed. If you buy a device that requires connecting to your WiFi network, you are going to run into so many problems. The first of which is that WiFi is a moving target that is of high value to hackers. I have owned many gadgets that cannot connect to modern WiFi networks because they only supported older, now broken security protocols. I can assure you that it's going to happen again.
Another problem with these devices is that they use off-the-shelf ARM SoCs; basically the same ones used in low-end phones. That means they are likely depending on the binary blobs from the manufacturer to handle the peripherals they need, which means they are stuck at whatever ancient version of Linux the SoC the manufacturers used when they were still designing the chip, which means that the device manufacturer must either discontinue their products fairly quickly or spend money to deliberately patch known vulnerabilities. And since there are binary blobs, there are also plenty of unknown vulnerabilities.
And that's the core problem with commercial IoT devices; you may own the hardware but you do not own the software. And hardware without software is a brick.
The good news is that there are much more open devices available than the big name ones you read about all the time. For instance, you can buy Sonoff WiFi light switches and easily replace the firmware with an open source replacement or even roll your own if you want to. Looking for a security camera? You can literally build yourself one with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the camera module, and a MicroSD card with some very easy-to-follow guides available online today.
Specifically on the Sonos front I am never buying another product of theirs again, and in general I have stopped buying anything that needs an internet connection to a component that I can't host. I haven't got an answer for everything yet, and on the multiroom audio front it's disappointing to see traditional speaker companies follow Sonos' lead with closed ecosystems. There is no multiroom equivalent of line-in or toslink. There is playfi but it's basically dead as far as I can see.
My next startup after current obligations expire is going to be pluggable multiroom sound and video on published standards. It's not a hard problem. There are multiple DIY solutions already, i.e. SnapCast, it just needs someone to invest in a business around it with some pucks a la chromecast audio (discontinued). Shift the brains onto a server which you could sell too and the pucks at least would be good for the life of the silicon (presumably a DAC + microcontroller + wifi reciever). Publish the protocols and hopefully grow a decently compatible ecosystem.
As far as regulation goes, I'd like to see it made mandatory to include a standard modular connector for all the "smart" bits in any device or system that would otherwise work without them.
Not enough memory or processor capacity anymore? Replace the module, instead of junking the speakers/car/washing machine/pacemaker...
The carbon emissions and sheer environmental damage from all this disposable crap make it a global imperative to do what can be done to reduce waste, and this would provide the benefits of software without the drawbacks of unnecessary obsolescence.