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A comment on HomeKit. Parent comment

Re:HomeKit by mturmon on Monday June 02, 2014 @07:18PM (#7837128)
Or "I'm going to bed early, turn off all the lights". Or, "I'm having a party outdoors, turn on all the exterior lights." Or, "I'm done listening to music, turn off the audio." There are lots of use cases.

But, all of this nifty tech does rely on tapping in to home infrastructure (switches and devices that understand the protocol), so it's a long haul.

These devices are wired in and have 50-year design lives. The life of these protocols seems to be significantly less than 50 years, which is a pretty big mismatch.

Yes, I'm still sore about the ~10 useless X-10 switches I put in in the 2000s. ;-)

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Re:HomeKit by ghaff on Monday June 02, 2014 @07:32PM (#7837201)
I still have a bit of wireless X10 I use for a couple of rooms that never got totally rewired :-)

But you're absolutely right. It's hard to sell incrementally useful capability when it requires spending a fair bit of time and money to upgrade components that are doing a decent job today and probably will for years to come.

Case in point. Would I buy a Nest if I needed a thermostat today? Probably. Will I buy one to replace a perfectly good programmable thermostat that's already installed and working? Probably not.

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Re:HomeKit by gregpilling on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @10:24AM (#7840354)
What is the best replacement for X10 stuff?
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Re:HomeKit by toomuchtodo on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @02:54PM (#7842078)
Z Wave and Zigbee are the two competing standards; swing by reddit.com/r/homeautomation for more info.
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