this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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I'm OK with it for some things tbh. With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working and the temp starts rising before I have a fridge full of spoiled food. With an oven I can know if I left the house with it still running. With the washer/dryer I can get notified when I need to fold the cloths before they get wrinkled. I think connected appliances have more useful applications than people give them credit for.
You don't need a wifi fridge for this. My wife and I manage this via Home Assistant and cheap Switchbot sensors. Fully self contained on my network, nothing to phone home anywhere.
The rest of the things you listed are kind of silly. If you left the oven on, that sucks, but you're already gone. Also, who sets the oven on before leaving the house? That's just an odd... like, really odd thing to do. Like, senility/dementia level odd, at which point what difference is a notification? And the dryer thing... well, that's nothing a 15 minute wrinkle cycle doesn't already solve on a dumb dryer.
"not that iot device, use this one instead and get less function out of it"
Wrinkle cycles don't work as well as getting the laundry while it's still hot. It reduces it some but not as much as getting the laundry when it's still hot. It also wastes a fair bit of energy to run the dryer for another 15 minutes instead of just telling me when it's done.
And it's not a dementia thing, it's an adhd+generalized anxiety thing. Piece of mind is pretty valuable to me and mine.
That's a fair take. I dunno, the potential security vulnerabilities outweigh any possible gains for me with most IOT devices, and I feel smart appliances are just more complicated to fix and more easily break down. Plus, the last thing I need is my washer to brick or my fridge to stop working from a botched firmware update.
Definitely a valid choice, just not one that's for everyone. I'm content that they're on a separate IoT network and can't reach into my main network and will make that trade for the QoL improvements that it buys me.