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”.