Smart Homes Are Terrible(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
Smart Homes Are Terrible
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/smart-homes-technology/685867/
12 comments
This is the way.
Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will.
I never want my house to fall apart because HA is down.
Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it. Especially paired with door sensors to auto-lock/close the door. I can pull up, have everything unlock, walk in, close the door, and have it lock behind me.
I also like motion lights, dimming late at night instead of full brightness, etc but those all "fail" back to just normal dimmable lights that I have to manually switch in the "worst case".
Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will.
I never want my house to fall apart because HA is down.
Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it. Especially paired with door sensors to auto-lock/close the door. I can pull up, have everything unlock, walk in, close the door, and have it lock behind me.
I also like motion lights, dimming late at night instead of full brightness, etc but those all "fail" back to just normal dimmable lights that I have to manually switch in the "worst case".
"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it."
I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it.
I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home" stuff. I mean, "for the low, low price of several thousand dollars, we can make it so you don't have to flip light switches anymore!" is just really not an appealing offer. Flipping light switches is not a problem.
I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it.
I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home" stuff. I mean, "for the low, low price of several thousand dollars, we can make it so you don't have to flip light switches anymore!" is just really not an appealing offer. Flipping light switches is not a problem.
A friend of mine's place is fully automated via HA. It's like living in a haunted house. Everything switches itself on and off or locks and unlocks or starts and stops via a bunch of magic triggers and timers and Node Red scripts that he's spent about a year fiddling with and still keeps finding edge cases where things go wrong. Each time it happens it's hours of debugging trying to figure out why the EV isn't charging or all the stuff in the house that's been automatically turned on is drawing 120% of its power budget or the garage isn't locking itself despite his wife having done the right silly-walk three or four times over. And even when it's working it's a madhouse, because everything is automated you're never certain whether something has been reliably activated or not, and every time I'm there it's "X hasn't happened, honey are you sure you did Y?".
The worst thing about it is that it removes the sense of agency (if you're not familiar with that, and I hate giving Wikipedia as a reference for anything but most of the writing on it otherwise is academic papers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). That's the very reason why we have placebo buttons in elevators and street crossings and progress bars that indicate nothing, it's to provide the sense of agency that we require.
The worst thing about it is that it removes the sense of agency (if you're not familiar with that, and I hate giving Wikipedia as a reference for anything but most of the writing on it otherwise is academic papers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). That's the very reason why we have placebo buttons in elevators and street crossings and progress bars that indicate nothing, it's to provide the sense of agency that we require.
It's just 1 more thing I don't think about. Like walking up to my car and it auto-unlocking when I put my hand on the handle. As I pull up to my house, the garage is opening and I pull right in. Same with auto-locking the door, I just close it and it will lock behind me. I like little bits of "magic" sprinkled into my day.
Yes in my opinion the benefit of smart home stuff is not controlling things from my phone or tablet or some touchscreen on the wall. But instead having the same physical switches and controls as one normally would, with the ability to automate things in the background.
Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.
The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.
Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.
The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.
> Control4
No need to say more.
The cost of these systems and the lack of features/control are both shocking. You can't configure anything on your own, you need a tech to come out to make the smallest change and they will try to upsell you. The contractor companies for control4 come and go and so even if you bought a upgrade ($10K+ price tag on a system not 4 years old) a few years ago, the new contractor wants to get paid somehow.
For the cost a relative spent on an upgrade I could have replaced all the smart tech in my house with the best (IMHO) and come in at well under that number.
Home Assistant still has some rough edges for non-tech people but it's amazing and I'd build a HA + Z-Wave/Zigbee system out of pocket before I'd accept a free Control4 system.
No need to say more.
The cost of these systems and the lack of features/control are both shocking. You can't configure anything on your own, you need a tech to come out to make the smallest change and they will try to upsell you. The contractor companies for control4 come and go and so even if you bought a upgrade ($10K+ price tag on a system not 4 years old) a few years ago, the new contractor wants to get paid somehow.
For the cost a relative spent on an upgrade I could have replaced all the smart tech in my house with the best (IMHO) and come in at well under that number.
Home Assistant still has some rough edges for non-tech people but it's amazing and I'd build a HA + Z-Wave/Zigbee system out of pocket before I'd accept a free Control4 system.
Hype-based ones like what's described in the original blog post are a nightmare. And I don't even need to pull the privacy card; the UX is already daunting enough.
A good benchmark I have is my wife, who didn't grow messing around with computers and a tinkerer's mindset: if she's taking more than a couple of tries or days to tinker and start living with something new, I need either to prep a better backup plan, or to cut it off. Very specialized stuff (like light bulb colors) are still too expensive to have more manual-like controls, but almost everything toggleable should have something one can press.
A good benchmark I have is my wife, who didn't grow messing around with computers and a tinkerer's mindset: if she's taking more than a couple of tries or days to tinker and start living with something new, I need either to prep a better backup plan, or to cut it off. Very specialized stuff (like light bulb colors) are still too expensive to have more manual-like controls, but almost everything toggleable should have something one can press.
Not surprised. I’ve seen a lot of the smart home platforms sold to consumers use shitty proprietary apps. I would never buy them, and I feel bad for those who do. It doesn’t mean a nice, Home Assistant setup is bad.
But they’re right about the setup costs
But they’re right about the setup costs
Here's what I think is the original post, without the paywall.
https://world.hey.com/jason/the-big-regression-da7fc60d
https://world.hey.com/jason/the-big-regression-da7fc60d
Interesting discovery! Looks like someone at the Atlantic saw the original post and asked them to rewrite it as an article. It's also interesting seeing the change in style when it goes from blog post to serious-media article.
I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.
The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.