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IoT is a fad. I have yet to see very many convincing arguments on why my house n... | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com · 3,602 words · saved by 1 readers

People are very hesitant to buy new appliances/home products. The last major change to the American home was the television, and that was ~50 years ago. Desktops had their day, but have been largely replaced by Laptops/Smartphones for many consumers. Adoption of new home appliances and technologies is glacially slow. Also newer electronics have shown they need replaced/upgraded every 2-5 years. You are going to be hard pressed to sell the idea that the consumer needs to replace all their light switches and smoke detectors even every 10 years. I barely replace light bulbs at that rate now. Cars about the only place where the IoT call home paradigm works. They are complicated machines that need semi regular maintenance. Placing sensors all over it makes sense. Trading updates for telemetry is attractive because a cars computer needs updates like any other computer. But I don't need a fridge that senses when I am low on milk, when I can just as easily look inside it and tell for myself. E

IoT is a fad in the current way we're going about it. What's not a fad is getting devices to communicate their health and status to an upstream repository for things like predictive analytics. This is already happening in the B2B sector. It will reach the consumer sector next, but like you said it will take 2-3 consumer product cycles to make it real. It won't be about remote control or any of the barely useful use-cases you're seeing with fridges and door locks and water bottles. It will be knowing your home's A/C has two weeks of operation before it seizes up. It will be knowing your…

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