One thing that consistently jumps out at me, though, is the lack of legitimate consumer demand. The motives for buying smart devices are shallow, for the individual. Trying out new toys with disposable income, purely out of boredom, tends to sum up why most people opt for slightly smarter dumb things.
I can think of many powerful applications for smart devices, and almost none of them are in the home. Parking garages, or almost anything transportation related, short term lockers at public places like gyms, any hospitality setting, where nothing actually belongs to an individual, but routine maintenance is required. Any vending machine is kind of already on the internet. Break rooms in office settings, and so on.
In some respects, I don't even want my desktop computer to be an autonomous internet enabled device, and it's the smartest thing I own. I don't regard it as a reliable server of information. I don't want anything personal to become a reliable server of information, because any information it might serve is almost assuredly, implicitly personal.
You wouldn’t really need IoT in the trash can if it’s emptied on a schedule, but a lot of public trash cans see very different usage amounts over the year.
As for durability, well, people destroy them. Your average public trash can at a park or a beach could need replacement several times during a summer thanks to things like one-usage grills. ;) In those cases the IoT device has the added advantage of being able to warn the fire department.
Most devices have batteries that last 5-10 years though, and often it’s the device that needs to get changed, not the battery. Like the trash can IoT devices, they’ll never actually outlive their battery. Even if a devices manages to survive its battery, 10 years is a long time, so you’d probably want to replace it regardless.
This is still a really cool article though, and it’d be silly for me to say that we’d never use it, but battery life isn’t actually a problem for us. Maybe it is in other places? And there is also the enviromental angle to consider, especially in political organizations.