The “smart-thing” pattern is coming for all of our stuff: homes, cars, toasters, and more. Still, the smart home still is too confusing and expensive for many consumers. Dan Moren writes for MacWorld:

My home is dumb.

Part of the reason is that I don’t have a house—I have an apartment, which I rent. That limits the investment I can make into smart home technology: No rewiring thermostats or installing smoke detectors for me.

But the other part of it is that right now, the smart home industry is disjointed, fragmented. There are a ton of disparate gadgets and more competing and wackily-named protocols than I can shake a (smart) stick at.

I disagree. The Phillips Hue (and it’s “Friends of Hue”) program seems to me to be a popular standard, and it works very well. Apple’s HomeKit and Siri-integration works very well as a hub. And while I also rent and cannot touch my thermostat, there are plenty of consumer fire-alarms, scales, AI-assistants, locks, and blinds that work with iOS. In fact, because of the difference that Dan alludes to between a “smart home” and a “smart room”, I’d argue renting makes it easier and cheaper to get into home automation.

The biggest issue with the smart home is the price and the “long upgrade cycle” on things like locks.