In the early 1990s, my roommate and I used to visit his family's tiny cabin in northern Wisconsin. The place was very rustic but did have electric heat. It was very cold and snowy during the winter. He could call the cabin's phone number and press * 2-3 times and it would tell the heat system to turn on or off. The system would respond somehow with a beep or two to tell him whether it was turning on or off. Seems like Mr. Fadell could have warmed his cabin up before arriving without building the Nest.

That said, I like the Nest, though I'm partial to the Ecobee because of the remote sensor it includes.

There's an LGR video (probably under oddware) where he tests out one of the "smart home" systems from the 1980s that sounds similar.

My brother does it with his Maine house. But TBH you can only turn the temperature down so far when you're not there in winter because of the pipes. (I admittedly keep my house pretty cool in the winter even when I'm there so there's not a huge difference between my away temperature and my in house during the day temperature.)

It's not just a problem for rich people. It's also nice to have if you are coming back home (to your normal home where you live) from a trip and the weather has been very cold or hot while you were gone.

Similar example: came back home from a long trip to stale air. Maybe there's another problem or maybe that's just me, but next time we start the air from the airport and the air is pretty normal by the time we get in.

not all first world people are rich

I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.

That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me:

1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households.

2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result.

3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX that you'll actually use. That's an amazing value proposition.

I use the programmable UX on my existing $40 dollar thermostat. It works fine and it's not that hard to use. It only ever requires adjusting when we leave for/return from vacation, and takes ~1 minute to get back into the right state each time.

I bought my Nest thermostat practically as soon as I moved in to a new build, for two primary reasons:

- it didn't look crap;

- I could figure out how to work it

I'm not so bothered about it being smart, least of all for it's 'learning', it just looks so much better on the wall (visually prominent when you walk in) than the white plastic sharp cornered box the developers put up.

If I spent more time/energy on it I'd do away with a wall-mounted thermostat entirely, and just have a HomeAssistant-connected relay right at the boiler.

Ours is helpful for turning the air up or down when we leave/come home or turning it up in the morning (we cool the house off at night so it holds it longer in the day before needing to fire up).

Granted our thermostat isn't really "smart" it just has an API exposed that integrates into Home Assistant.

I wouldn't put in one of those cloud based ones like Nest or Ecobee

Which one are you using with Home Assistant?

To transfer wealth from investors to founders.

What a ridiculous statement to make and perfectly exemplifies the absurdity of HN comment section.

I donno, I feel your reactive defense of a smart thermostat (with a comical origin story) is more absurdist HN than the person you're replying to.

Ultimately, though, nothing is more absurdist HN than two people bickering about the definition of “absurdist HN”.