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When Smart Goes Dumb
We now have a lot of examples of cloud-enabled smart devices that don’t work anymore. What we don’t have is a plan B that prevents old gadgets from becoming garbage.
Last year, a well-known company decided to sunset support for a hardware device that worked through an app. It was not a cheap device—it cost $230 new. But a mere three and a half years after its release, the device stopped working essentially because the company discontinued the app it used.
It was frustrating for consumers, because it ended up neutering a device that presumably should have lasted a long time.
But to evoke a famous Mitch Hedberg routine we wrote a rebuttal against a decade ago, the nice thing about a smart toothbrush that stops working correctly is that it’s still a toothbrush.
Ever wanted Tedium to research something for you? Now’s your chance!
As part of a grand experiment to always try new things with the Tedium format, Ernie is offering commissions of his research time via Ko-Fi. Pay $15 and he’ll dive into any topic that you’d like (within reason) over a 15-minute period. (If this takes off, he’ll offer longer research sessions.) Have a pressing question about the world you’ve always wanted answered? He’ll take a stab at it, and then post it on Bluesky and Mastodon as freely available social content. (Don’t want it posted? Pay a couple bucks more, and it’s yours alone.)
A guy who reviews toothbrushes reviews the now-discontinued Oral-B Guide. Wonder how I could get a gig reviewing toothbrushes.
Yes, that’s correct, the device we’re talking about is the Oral-B Guide, an Alexa-capable device that lost much of its smart-speaker functionality last year because Procter & Gamble discontinued the device.
We have written much about smart devices in the past, with a 2020 piece basically predicting this state of affairs. Problem is, it can be hard to figure out whether a device you own or are looking to buy is just a fancy paperweight.
Which explains why it’s so nice to see the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) Education Fund gather all this stuff in one place. The organization’s Electronic Waste Graveyard, which I mentioned the other night, highlights all sorts of devices—including the toothbrush mentioned above—as examples of companies’ tendencies to force planned obsolescence even when the consumer is far from ready to let go. I wanted to share a few of my favorite examples from the list, and I think they show just how messy these kinds of smart-device forced retirements can get:
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Mellow Sous Vide: An excellent example of the seeming bait-and-switch nature of some of the devices in the graveyard, the Mellow device lost all of its smart features after a 2020 update to the app that added a subscription service. In retrospect, it was clearly a move made under duress, based on the fact that Mellow’s website currently redirects to a GoDaddy landing page. (It wasn’t the only knock Mellow faced—it got an embarrassing 1 out of 10 review from Wired over food-safety concerns.)
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Amazon Halo: Over the years, Amazon has had an interesting track record on device support. Its Fire phone may have been the greatest gadget flop of the 2010s. It tries a lot of things, and sometimes those things fail. Three of the objects in the graveyard were part of the Amazon Halo fitness brand, which shuttered in 2023. Getting it the worst: The Halo Rise, an alarm clock that only got 11 months of support. Amazon was responsible from a business standpoint with the Halo shutdown, offering refunds to people who bought devices within a year of the announcement. But that doesn’t stop these objects from filling a landfill.
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Withings Body Cardio Scale: The problem with this device was effectively a regulatory one. Nokia, which had acquired the Withings brand just as the device was getting launched, got cold feet after learning that the device’s Pulse Wave Velocity feature, which can detect issues with hypertension. Cool feature, but Nokia’s lawyers freaked out when they realized it might not have gone through the correct regulatory process before hitting the market. And so, they removed the feature from the app. That didn’t do much to appease frustrated customers. (Side note: I have had a negative smart-scale experience. I got a scale from an employer for free as part of a wellness program. After I left the company, the scale was turned off. It’s a paperweight.)
Pretty wild and diverse examples, huh. So I think a complicated thing here, which I think U.S. PIRG’s excellent work emphasizes by publishing a list like this, is that these devices are each conceptually problematic. And the problematic thing is the ongoing commitment the cloud requires. None of these objects actually requires you to contact a remote server—if you had a computer that ran the software instead in your house, they would probably work about as well. It is clear that we need to move in a local-first direction, even with internet-enabled gadgets.
Here’s the thing, though: Currently, things are going in the opposite direction. Recently, homelabber and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling recently described a situation where he had to set up a dishwasher—as in, a device that people don’t replace particularly often—with an app, with no guarantees that app would stick around. The whole thing feels conceptually compromised.
Beyond devices that just work without an internet connection, what I personally would like to see is a new generation of smart devices built around self-hosting gear.
For example: The vibrant ecosystem around Home Assistant is an excellent future direction for smart devices, and one that could handle nearly every use case listed above. There is a case that a lot of what we do on the cloud could be handled on a centralized device in the living room, without even phoning home somewhere. The success of Plex shows that this use case could go mainstream. But it requires some pressure on the companies whose business models rely on this recurring revenue. (My thought: Offer the cloud service! But also, offer a one-time payment for software that can be locally hosted.)
An example of a company doing this right is, ironically, Amazon. On top of cloud support, the company’s Blink camera service offers a sync module for its devices that connects to your local Wi-Fi network and stores video locally. It doesn’t require a subscription, but if you want one, you can still get one. While Amazon has a spotty track record on smart devices and phoning home, this strategy could easily be picked up by other companies. Don’t want to pay a subscription to another cloud service? Buy this device that handles the hard part. Don’t want to support an app anymore? Donate to Home Assistant and give your customers an alternative.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s one I think a lot of manufacturers could learn something from.
Smart Links
Word on the street is that Bluesky is adding blue checkmarks soon—and the old-style ones, not the bastardized version X has. I will probably write a piece on this next week when it actually launches, but I think this is a good idea after the impersonation saga I spotted back in December. Domains do not go far enough.
Paul Rudd recreating his infamous Super NES launch ad 34 years later, for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, was not on my list of things to expect this week. (Wet Hot American Summer co-star Joe Lo Truglio making an appearance? Even better.) And no, he hasn’t aged a day.
In a week in which Pitchfork publicly torched Benson Boone so aggressively that it probably set back the sparkly jumpsuit trend by a good 20 years, this 2.4-rated Will Smith review just doesn’t feel mean enough.
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