Starting around when smart refrigerators were first announced, I've wondered just how often people really are making smart homes. Networked, YES, but smart?
How practical is the smart home, especially the well-outfitted one? My family was the parents and three boys, and we (bought and) lived in four homes over the period from when I, the youngest, was a toddler, until I no longer lived "at home." That was 14 years, followed by the years my parents lived with no kids in the home, and in fact moved on to a fifth home.
Who's going to smart-outfit five homes in less than twenty years?
Here are a couple of excerpts from a gizmodo article at
[Link: gizmodo.com]:
A smart home that responds to your every command and automates mundane tasks is a tantalizing dream. But the reality is that given the current limitations of technology, competing standards, and devices that quickly become obsolete, trying to make that dream a reality today just isn’t worth all the effort.
A few years ago, when I lived in a small two-bedroom apartment, I was utterly devoted to making my home smart....
But something happened that soured me on the whole smart home idea: I moved into an actual house... programming complex schedules—using less-than-stellar apps. My eventual solution to the task was a simple one: I just ignored it, and three years later all of my Philips smart bulbs still sit unused in a box in a closet.
We should definitely focus on home networking and audio/video sources, but smart bulbs? I'm reminded of a Chuck Berry song: Too Much Monkey Business!
