90% of smart devices are for novelty, or for you to spend more time setting up and maintaining their automations than they save you in being automated.

But that 10% is magic. A fan that switches on when air quality falls below a threshold? Not that useful in a living room, but in a workshop setting - especially a shared workshop setting? Awesome. Just awesome.

A well defined use case, in the right setting, and smart stuff can be genuinely very useful. Usually that’s not how they’re used - i know, because of the 15-20 smart things i have only one or two are genuinely useful.

Having the option to say “hey siri turn on the fan” while you’re in bed is pretty nice. This kind of thing works pretty reliably these days with the right setup. The fan still has a physical switch.

The reason is UI.

There's only a limited number of features that you can pack into a few buttons and a 7-segment display. If you want to sell outside the US and need to support the long-tail of non-English languages, preferably without per-country product variants, you can't even label the buttons any more, you have to rely on simple pictograms and icons.

If there's a $1 microcontroller in your device (and there often is), you're very tempted to implement lots of features which cost you almost nothing, but that kind of UI just doesn't really let you do so. Sure, you could add a proper touch screen with a localizable UI stack, with reflowable text and support for displaying Kanji and RTL languages, but that's often more expensive (and less practical) than slapping on a BLE or WiFi chip.

I have lots of smart gadgets that also have physical switches. It's convenient to be able to control them in more than one way, from more than one location.

Anyway, why are you commenting here if you're not into this sort of thing? Feels like you're just trying to stir up an argument.

If your fan isn't Byzantine fault tolerant, you're irrelevant

And some people don’t see any reason for the internet and just wanna use phones and physical mail. To each their own.

I have an automation that automatically regulates the level down when I do something where I want to minimize noise (like watching a movie or when I go to sleep)

Sure you can do everything manually, but I like networked things, especially those using open standards (matter over openthread) so I can connect them all together easily.

For example, every time I watch a movie the roller blinds automatically come down, the lights turn off and the fan turns down, I think thats just cool.

> Physical switches are simply better

Pff, assuming that everyone have arms and hands much?

Also I don't see the point of a fan, I live right next to the ocean, if you want moving air, why don't you just open a window?! Talk about useless invention

You can have the best of both worlds with a hand-off-auto switch.