Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.
You're describing those things as failures. I see them as successes.
A smart device that doesn't need a subscription to feed and keep track of, doesn't consume hours of my life trying to get my attention, doesn't get shared with the world, and doesn't bother me with needless bullshit? It just quietly does its thing and it also lasts 8 years?
That sounds great! Count me in!
(Actually, I'm already a member. My personal favorite smart devices come with open-source ESPHome firmware pre-installed, and they have all of the features I've described above. These manufacturers make their money by exchanging money for widgets in simple one-time transactions, not by being sneaky under-handed rent-seeking slimeballs who live to optimize ways continuously extract money out of my billfold for the rest of my life.)
Watched this when it came out. I felt like it had that typical Technology Connections problem where it will take one under explored point along a Pareto frontier and conflate it for the global optimal design.
At least that was my experience with the toaster, microwave, and dishwasher detergent episodes.
While Hybrid System II is very clever and non-intuitive coming from an ICE or EV frame of reference there are reasons even Toyota hasn’t placed all their chips on this bet. In fact as Japan’s largest manufacturer they want to have a bet on every point of Pareto frontier which is why Toyota makes cars with their own competing iForce hybrid design (I’m a big fan of the generator + torque assist), hydrogen cars, electrics, plug in hybrids, diesels, propane and yes gas.
Specifically Hybrid System II is best if you can 1) only have one car 2) don’t have a place to charge it 3) do lots of starts and stops driving around town.
This recent article[1] answers a lot of these questions with great photos too. I would go so far to say it’s the most authoritative piece to date. Previously [2].
"rabbit starvation" refers to a diet of mostly lean protein, deficient in fat. So much so that it results in malnutrition.
Eating nothing but rabbits is one way to get it, but is not really about "subsisting on small herbivores". It's the fact that the meat is very lean, not fatty. Apparently "mal de caribou" is the same thing, and Caribou / Reindeer are not small.
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists.
1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed, they will provide access to an approved list of individuals and drill the lock for $40.
Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID, but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like that, we have four other people listed with access, one of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're set and insured for the declared value of the contents of the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks are both destroyed as well!
Bank vault can be key+combination (eg three letters) or dual key or others. For example in a dual key: one key from the bank and one key being your own key.
If a key is lost, you go and prove your identity (easier if any bank employee is familiar with you) and ask for a new key. A date is set and a locksmith shall come, you are next to him and next to the bank employee while he uses the bank's key and lockpicks your lock. Then he configures it for a new key (or replace the lock).
It's cost you something like $300 or whatever.
Source: been next to locksmith opening a bank vault, twice, in two different countries. Once for a bank belonging to a deceased family member (we had the key but not the three-letters combination) and once not because I lost my key but because the bank's lock (on my vault) went defective.
So it's not "my key from the my vault at the bank melted during a housefire, so I can never access my vault at the bank anymore" nor is it "I forgot my three-letters combination, so until the end of the universe that bank vault shall stay locked".
In general, identity (the bank checking who you are) is often involved in regular unlocking and there will be an identity-only recovery procedure that will work even if you lose your usual credential (key, passcode, card, whatever). This may involve drilling a lock and the bill for that.
My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I carefully walk through the house with a video recorder, opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on. It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the unlikely even that you need it.
The plastic used in the black/yellow brand is brittle when it gets cold — it breaks upon simple impact/sliding. Also, you cannot see inside them without opening the lid.
The clear plastic is usually a bit thicker, and more rubberized — it'll still break, but more difficultly.
As to why they're against them, I don't know their reason, but there used to be only one size of tote. There there was big and small. And then, for some fxcking reason, they decided to make ones that were roughly as big as the big ones. Just enough that you have to take half a second to re-eyeball-ruler measure them. But in isolation, if you've got one in front of you, you can't know if it'll tetris properly with another one until they're side-by-side and it turns out they're not.
Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.
Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.
Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.
Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.
Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.