I just can't see the potential. Increase the complexity of the system and you increase the risk of failure, and when things are failing at home, that means you've got more housework to do. Who wants that?

I spent a bunch of money replacing every light bulb in my house with an LED so that I'd never have to deal with burnt-out light bulbs again. That was a use of improved technology that simplified my life.

If you hook your household devices up to the internet and make them dependent on external services they will always be prone to breaking. If I get some fancy internet-connected light bulb and have to spend even so much as ten minutes, ever, in its lifetime, figuring out why it stopped working, then it has already become a worse value proposition than the passive, non-internet thing it hoped to replace.

Yeah, the first mistake was _and make them dependent on external services_. An internet-connected light bulb's failure mode should be "temporarily become a regular light bulb".

"I like an escalator, man, because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs." --Mitch Hedberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1ryH3igKc