The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches (close to 50 of them), and I think it’s good? It’s been about 2 years now and I really haven’t had any issues.<p>The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.<p>There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)<p>Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”<p>My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.<p>Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.