I replaced all my thermostats for both of my homes with Sinopé products. Smart, allows integration with locally hosted home automation, and compatible with ZigBee networks. Purchased my first batch in late 2021 and haven't had any issues. Physical temperature controls if the LAN goes offline. Highly recommend.
Here's the hardware installed for on-prem home automation using the open-source Home Assistant software:
* Raspberry Pi[1] CPU, heatsink, A/C adapter, and case
* ConBee II Zigbee USB gateway[2]
* USB ADATA Micro SD card reader and USB cable
* Micro SD card (for operating system and Home Assistant)
Same for myself. Sinooé devices are extremely solid (at least the Zigbee ones I've used) and work perfectly with Home Assistant. Would highly recommend.
This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.
Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I've got the faceplate PCB done and working; the rotary encoder and ring working; and the display working but with terrible code with a low refresh rate.
I need to ship at the end of October to beat the retirement date. Plans to get some regular development report-outs and pre-orders are coming quite soon.
It's open source, and uses ESP32-C6 so it can be Wifi, BLE, or Zigbee, whatever software you intend to load onto it.
What language are you writing in? I recently did some rotary encoder work for a round display on an ESP32, and found the dev kit micro python stuff to be terribly slow. I’ve had good luck with LVGL in C++, and my “ick” feelings about c++ are pretty much totally resolved by a healthy dose of AI chat bots.
Send me an email if you’re interested in more info.
Very close to having one! I've been working on getting a blog published and a store to pre-order the finished product. I'll reply back here with the link when it's ready.
I got burned recently by Ecobee in the same way. The problem with 'smart' interfaces for traditionally mechanical devices is that the useable lifetime (support period) of low-end microprocessors and software, especially online APIs, is often far shorter than the mechanical device it's attached to.
Similar to how people that keep cars around for 10+ years are stuck with dated and worthless 'infotainment' systems, Google and Ecobee can't even honor their product for long enough to outlast the HVAC units.
What burns me is that it wouldn't be much of an ask for them to push one final (optional) update that would open LAN-only access to core functionality. I and many others in the HA/ESPHome community have written hardware integrations to devices over RS485/UART with unpublished/black-box protocols, so a simple HTTP API would have an integration within days.
It would maybe cost an engineer at Nest/Ecobee a day or two of work, and the goodwill would make me far more likely to purchase a newer model. As it is, I've committed to avoiding (where possible) devices that aren't local-first.
As an early Nest employee who worked on the first-gen thermostat I can tell you definitively that you're way off base here. That doesn't mean that Google shouldn't have done more to keep these units alive (and indeed that's one of the reasons I left Google). But these devices were designed in 2010-11. Even keeping the Linux kernel up to date with the latest version is a major undertaking. Adding major functionality like Matter compatibility, or even a simple (but secure!) local API, would take a seasoned engineering team a considerable amount of time.
That said, investing in devices that are local first is certainly good advice, provided the APIs are open and well supported.
Absolutely nothing is stopping Google from keeping all the integrations working until the thermostats physically break. No one asked for a new kernel and whatnot.
Is keeping alive the infrastructure that servers the 1st and 2nd generation devices online and just proxy the communication between the old features and new features available in HomeKit and other smart home hub apps such as big undertaking that Google balked at it?
Recent extreme frustration with Google products in mind, I'm tempted to read the crux of this post as, "Google engineers/designers are incompetent." It might be unfair, but on a day when Google Search, Youtube History Search, and (whaddya know) my Nest Thermostat have all failed me, the temptation is strong.
> Recent extreme frustration with Google products in mind, I'm tempted to read the crux of this post as, "Google engineers/designers are incompetent."
Engineers don’t make business decisions on when to end support, that’s a management decision; engineers ideally ought to be consulted on what it would take to continue support, but even that isn’t guaranteed. If planned obsolescence has been a business strategy, literally having an obsolescence switch and pulling the trigger on it has to be tempting to certain decision-makers even when support would be practical.
I think the reality is that the engineers are competent but this was just not a priority they were given and they were not going to spend nights making this happen instead of hanging out with their kids.
They might even have gotten in trouble if they had rolled out an update that product management didn't ask for and is perceived to reduce incentive to upgrade to a new device
If I’m a Google engineer, what motivation do I have to make decisions that keep a device running for a decade?
Even more pertinent, when it gets time to go through the promo process and when I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs, why would I want to be on a project supporting old legacy tech that I can’t spin to show how it helped the company’s revenue?
I’ve never worked for Google. But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech.
And even worse, every company is focused on “AI” these days. If you aren’t part of an initiative that can be said to be AI adjacent, if you care about your career and comp, you shouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
> If I’m a Google engineer, what motivation do I have to make decisions that keep a device running for a decade?
Empathy and being a good human being in relation to society. Making devices that look good at first and cause pain later, when it's too late to do anything about it... is bad.
> I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs
Fair, and that's a reason to _not_ put in the effort to make longer lasting devices.
> But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech
And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
Say the employee did want to work on the product in spite of it not being in their best interest. How are they going to get the buy in and the team to make the change and the support to get it pushed to devices in the field?
And no one works for a privacy invading ad tech company because they want to make the world a better place. It’s purely about making a shit ton of money.
> And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
Despite the newest LP about being the best employer, Amazon has been the shittiest of the BigTech employer as long as I can remember. Their reputation hasn’t changed anything about their profitability or stock price.
Before you ask if I knew that, why did I work there. I was 46 at the time, it was my 8th job out of 10 and it was purely remote and a “field by design role” that was remote until a year after I left. It was purely a money and resume play.
I would expect a thermostat to last 15+ years across multiple home owners - it should be an improvement over a mechanical one, after all. If that's not adding to Google's bottom line, they shouldn't have "disrupted" that market in the first place.
Let me turn it around. Imagine that you are a Google engineer who worked on Search, YouTube, or Nest. How would you feel reading your own post? You would probably vehemently disagree! I'm not sure your sentiment is relative in 2025. Everyone on HN knows that any "web scale" public product (with billions of users) 100s of engineers behind it. And, it takes very good ones to keep them running and continuously improve them.
Thus, in response to:
> It might be unfair
I say: Yes, it is unfair and unnecessary to post. It adds very little to the wider discussion.
Security is always the excuse, but it's a local device connected to Wifi. Add a setting to the existing menus that is opt in to turn on the new API.
Beyond that, there's what, like 4 or 5 parameters that are useful to set, and a few that can be read. It wouldn't be necessary to over engineer the API, even a few simple, fixed TCP packets to query state and set the basic parameters like mode, fan, room and set temp would be all that is needed. It can be ugly and basic, just release the info and other devs would run with it.
For example, the older TPLink Kasa line of smart devices have a simple TCP packet protocol for local control. The 'security' was easily reverse engineered (simple key autokey cipher), but there wasn't any outrage. Their simple scheme that wasn't meant to be widely known meant it was possible for others to build the integrations.
A bit of an unusual idea, but: if the users of such a thing are folks who're already playing with HA and are tech savvy, why not just expose the API and tell users that they're "only allowed to use the "hacker's update in good faith" if they put the devices on a separate network without internet access?
Your team doesn't need to spend a ton of time on making it super secure, and DIYers can continue to use the hardware for as long as it physically works, me thinks
Not a lawyer, but liability waivers may not apply if there is determined to be gross negligence or recklessness.
Making a reasonably-designed API available, only if connected to an inaccessible network, doesn't sound dangerous, but the goodwill gained might be hard to weigh against a miniscule chance of malware, which would revise everyone's opinion of the degree of negligence or recklessness.
"Even keeping the Linux kernel up to date with the latest version is a major undertaking."
To me this sounds always backward. We make a choice of tools, and now we can't support you longer, and blame it on the tools. It's like "I need a car because I've moved out of the city center." Yes, of course you need a car, but because of your choices and actions.
If you prioritize easier development over long term support when choosing tools, then this is what you get.
Of course it's ok and valid to make that tradeoff, but then don't blame it on the tools, but on your choices.
Okay, but isn’t this really about, why should Google spend money making things work better for iPhone users? It doesn’t like doing that. That’s what Matter support is really about. It’s always been about Apple Home.
And before you accuse me of being “way off base” lemme ask you: why doesn’t Gmail support push for iOS Mail anymore?
> What burns me is that it wouldn't be much of an ask for them to push one final (optional) update that would open LAN-only access to core functionality.
The last dev who understands the code and the build tooling left years ago.
At least HVAC systems have a mostly standard control system and thermostats are easy to swap out. If a thermostat goes out of support and looses functionality, you do not need to replace the entire HVAC system; only the relatively cheap thermostat.
I'm contrast, while it is often possible to replace an infotainment system, the replacement needs to have been designed for a fairly specific set of cars, and actually installing it requires paying a mechanic for most people.
If your car is old enough to have a standard DIN radio, you can easily replace it with a modern CarPlay/Android Auto unit. And cars that are new enough to have CarPlay/Android Auto built in seem to be generally holding up. It’s really just cars from a specific window (after they started putting nav systems and screens, before adopting CarPlay) that age really badly.
In the early 2000s, even cars with oddball radios (like a CD slot adjacent to climate controls for example) could have an aftermarket head unit installed because dash trim kits were available to replace the proprietary layout with a DIN slot. Is this not the case for the era you mentioned?
> Similar to how people that keep cars around for 10+ years are stuck with dated and worthless 'infotainment' systems, Google and Ecobee can't even honor their product for long enough to outlast the HVAC units
I would never buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay. The four protocols that Apple created to interface with non Apple devices - the original iPod protocol, AirPrint, AirPlay and CarPlay haven’t had any breaking changes. As of at least three years ago, I could use an old first gen iPad from 2010 (the first to support AirPlay/Airprint) and use it with modern Roku TVs with AirPlay support and modern printers.
My old 2011 Sonic that I had with a USB port that supported the iPod protocol for displaying titles for audio and controlling iPods still worked with every iPhone I had.
But I would never trust Google not to kill a device.
I don’t get who uses Nest or other non-first party thermostats anymore:
All modern furnaces/ACs/heat pumps require their own smart thermostat to work optimally. So if you install Bryant furnace, you end up with Bryant smart thermostat, and so on. In fact, when choosing new furnace/AC choose brand with good software in thermostat first and foremost - units themselves are pretty identical otherwise.
That really isn’t true. I have a split level heat pump with no thermostat, well, there is one in the remote control that sets a mini thermostat on each internal unit. Basically, we don’t have a central thermostat but that isn’t weird for Seattle.
Incidentally, I would love for a better remote control that was easier to use, we might use our heat pump more than a couple of weeks a year in that case.
I got lucky with my 2011 Toyota because the inputs are standard Bluetooth, an aux port, and iPod-style USB. The display is also a VFD pixel display and not some crappy LCD with a resistive touchscreen.
Of course, new devices might use some incompatible Bluetooth standard in the future.
Serious question: What does this mean? I'm such a dumbo about networking. Is it simple for an app to distinguish between "LAN" and "WAN" network requests?
Connected thermostats are great in theory! But they should not have to rely on a cloud connection. A local network with the option of internet connectivity would be awesome; but, it seems, no company is going to become uber successful if there isn't the option of forced upgrades and cloud subscriptions. Look at Ring...
Honeywell's z-wave thermostat basically does all of the shiny shit you'd want out of a connected thermostat while making basically impossible to lock the user out because Honeywell decided it didn't like the product anymore. Why people have to keep relearning this with IoT devices baffles me, and that Z-wave or maybe Zigbee isn't what's insisted upon.
If you're VC-funded then the valuation is the most important thing. The only way to juice your valuation is to get recurring revenue, because it comes with an 8x to 10x multiple. So you don't want to be in the hardware game, you want to use hardware to get a foothold in someone's home and then get them to pay you a subscription to maintain that hardware.
I think the valuation thing is what drives 90% of this stuff. Whereas an established company like Honeywell is more interested in building products and selling a lot of them, so they're going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation instead of a cloud-first implementation.
I don't think I would ever buy a hardware product from a company billing themselves as a VC-backed startup.
Also, FWIW the Nest is a perfectly functional thermostat even if you never hook it up to their app. We found the scheduling and learning features to be really annoying so we turned them all off and never connected ours to the cloud.
I agree almost entirely, but I gotta quibble a point:
> so [companies like Honeywell] are going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation
"Established" companies also see the long-term value of subscriptions and are also hopping on that bandwagon.
Additionally, customers are extremely sensitive to up-front price, so a product that's more expensive up-front but with no subscription fee and longer-term value will have trouble finding a foothold in the market compared to cheaper but subscription-based alternatives. Especially if the alternatives are "1 year free!" as they usually are.
I bought a $20 Zigbee thermostat from AliExpress and it has been fantastic. It turns on when it's cold, and off when it's hot. Anything else, I can do with software, because it's just Zigbee.
I go for Zwave by choice but Zigbee comes a close second. It does share 2.4GHz with wifi but its many tiny bands fit within the "edges" of the wifi bands. If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily. Even if you don't, it will still work fine - the messages are tiny.
Both Zwave and Zigbee build mesh networks with multiple routes. Wifi devices ... don't. Wifi is fine for IoT but it isn't optimised for it. My fridge/freezer uses wifi as does my oven and microwave. It doesn't matter if they lose comms sometimes and there is no choice anyway.
My light switches are Zwave. Thanks to way modern UK wiring is done, most of my switches end up with an extra conductor and so are permanently powered and act as hubs for the battery powered window sensors and the like.
My cameras are all PoE ethernet, including the door bell. All Reolink.
I have two UPSs with at least 30 mins run time. I could easily put in a genny or a battery or even use my car (EV) but its not important enough (yet). So far everything will work without the internet.
I have deployed two VLANS for IoT - THINGS, and SEWER for the really worrying gear on it!
> If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily.
I worked for a company that converted a legacy wire protocol with no QoS guarantees to be used over a proprietary modification of Zigbee. One of the managers complained that their volume control would randomly climb to the max loudness. The protocol used press/release packets for button presses and if the volume-up release packet was lost due to interference, you got a runaway increase in volume from the system assuming it was still held down. This usually happened when the channel assignment was in a band used for active wifi.
Plenty of companies are successfull and don't rely on forced cloud. Reolink for example. Plenty of others.
The real difference is that these are not american sv vc backed companies like nest or ring. they are chinese companies set on disrupting those vc backed companies using this local first mindset as the differentiator.
My Insteon thermostat is a great dumb thermostat that I can also send commands to over a serial connection to a powerline/RF modem. (Very similar to Z-Wave's RF, though proprietary.)
The key is do not buy smart devices with Wi-Fi. There are better products for serious people. Everyone here with a Zigbee or Z-Wave product probably learned that the hard way first. ;)
I have a Honeywell t6 that I got when they installed a new unit - Honeywell INSISTS that you create an account and download the app to connect it to your home network
Thankfully this is bullshit and you can connect it directly from the thermostat to HomeKit - you will not find a single piece of documentation on this though and will be told it’s not possible
The real kicker is that there is a notification to register your device that you can’t get rid of unless you register your device
You can only snooze it for a couple weeks at a time
How I’d love to have one on one conversations with the evil people who approve this type of crap
Anything that requires a cloud account and does not offer a self hosted option, even a limited one, should be considered throw away. Would be nice if google released a self hosted server for these as a nod and thanks to the early customers.
To each their own, but the idea of an internet connected thermostat (at great expense!) never made sense to me. A $20 Honeywell lets you program 4 regions per day (waking, day, evening, night) and will be fine almost every day of the year. Has a battery backup and never failed me.
I guess it would be cute to get some analytics dashboard, but that’s about where my interest ends.
I really appreciate mine. My big use case is that we go away for a week or two over winter sometimes and turn the house down to 55F. The radiators take quite a while to heat the house back up from that temperature, so I turn the temperature back up remotely the morning before we fly back.
That said, I'm quite annoyed that Google is nuking my perfectly functional thermostat, and I will be buying an Ecobee to replace it, and integrating it with home assistant.
55F is the temp I know a lot of people keep their house at in the winter. Mostly older poorly insulated homes where the bill will be absurd if they put it at 72*. Sweaters work. So do blankets.
In case you've never done it, let your house get into low 40's (F) and it takes days to warm up. The air gets warm fast, but your bed and the floor take a long time to warm up.
Well beyond a basic dumb thermostat I like that my EcoBee can use several wireless temperature sensors. During the day I have it set to only use the downstairs sensors and at night it only uses the upstairs sensors.
Can a $20 Honeywell thermostat do that with wireless sensors? If it can, I will get one.
The issue that the Nest solved for me was figuring out how long it took for the hot water to get to the radiators, and what the bounce looked like after it got there. It'll stop calling for heat before it reaches the final temp because it will still keep going up.
It doesn't need to be cloud-connected to do so, but that's not a feature I'm aware a $20 Honeywell has.
I used to have a Honeywell wi-fi thermostat. It looked like any other thermostat you've ever seen, except you could connect it to a home hub. It was nice because you could exactly what you're describing, but you could also do it in the app.
What made it worth it was being able to turn off the air or heat when you weren't home automatically. Now all or the "AI training" garbage? Yeah, forget that. I used to work in an office with a nest and it was torture if you showed up too early if stayed a little too late.
Everyone always says this stuff, but man these things are such garbage to use: terrible user interface, LCD screen with random blinking elements to tell you that's being edited, response rate slower than a ping to Mars. Modern app-connected thermostats are so much better.
I have the same thing and to be honest, if I had to replace a $200 thermostat every 2 years I would gladly do it. In fact, this whole thing has made me go and research which thermostat will fit where I live.
It's starting to look like when you buy any kind of electronics gizmo with a UI, your choices are limited to:
1. A non-smart device that will work forever but looks and feels like it's still in the 90s
2. A device with a nice, responsive UI, but destined for the landfill because it's chained to a cloud service.
Why are these things mutually exclusive? Across so many product categories, there's seemingly few or no options for a nice UI but without dependence on an Internet service that will inevitably shut down.
Because people won't pay (or the companies(' research) don't think they'll pay) much for the hardware, so it's a loss leader or barely profitable promotion for the subscription service.
Not that straightforwardly in Nest's particular case to be fair, but a lead in to other products, and Nest was perhaps bought by Google before having to worry too much about profit margins(?).
Luckily, this can all be achieved using a Wi-Fi or (even better) a Z-Wave thermostat that is 100% locally-controlled using something like Home Assistant or any number of other solutions.
The guy I replied to was asking why you'd want an Internet connected thermostat.
I am a HA guy and prior to my ecobee I ran an American Radio Thermostat with local HA support and you could control over curl. But the wifi module was so old that no modern device connected to it when I had to reset it up.
The shameful part is that the only thing that even remotely (no pun intended) needs a server to even be online, is the out-of-home control, just for NAT traversal. It should be free to Google for these to have at least in-home smart functionality forever.
Well, that, and the moving target of updating an "app" every year for all the breaking changes Google and (especially) Apple do to the mobile OS. Although honestly I'd rather have a QR code that links you to a PWA hosted on the thermostat itself.
I’m affected by this, and as pissed at Google about it as anyone, but the headline is overblown. The old Nest devices continue to function as thermostats, and the on-device features like scheduling still work. But I need the cloud-based features (particularly remote control via the app), so I went ahead and paid the upgrade tax.
This should be pretty much true for every "connected" device out there. They should all have a mode that works by directly connecting over the local LAN. Why do device manufacturers refuse to support this configuration?
If I want to change the volume of my "smart speaker" from my phone that's also on my LAN, it shouldn't require a round trip to a server on the Internet, or an account with credentials, or any of that nutty stuff.
This pisses me off to no end. I paid a lot... I expected my Nest gear to work for as long as I own my house. I paid extra to get someone to install it with my home system. Now I see that my Nest Protect is saying it needs to be changed... not some small module... the whole thing. Next will be my thermostats... I can't understand why I'd pay for them again.
Agreed, I bought into Google mesh Wi-Fi and they updated it to remove vlan bridging which made it useless for my ISP which required that. When I reached out they gaslit me awhile before saying yeah, we nerfed you, sucks for you.
I was hoping that at least my Home Assistant integration would keep working. That sucks terribly. Lesson of the day: Avoid any IoT device that you can't use without an external service.
FWIW, I replaced my Nests with Centralite Pearls a few years ago, and have been extremely happy with them WRT Home Assistant. The Pearl doesn't seem to be widely available anymore, but any Zwave or Zigbee thermostat + a local hub gets you a thermostat that should work with Home Assistant and will be immune to being sunsetted like this.
Can someone at Google explain why the company can’t end formal support for the thermostat but make the API open? It’s a thermostat. It has 3 real functions - cool, heat, fan. What could it possibly hurt to let owners access the endpoints without touching Google servers?
This assumes Google's servers are pushing to the thermostat. It seems more likely that the thermostats are pulling from Google's servers, so that they don't have to worry about firewalls.
NEST protect has been a thorn in my side. Aside from just completely eating batteries - it constantly has to reconnect.
I wish the internet of things was soo much better than it is. There was a dream once of a world that worked efficiently, and then profit models came in and destroyed it.
You’ve got to use the one specific brand and type of battery they insist on. It’s some energizer lithium thing I’ll have to check for you and comment later. Anything else fails very fast, the correct ones last for years.
I shied away from wyze when they killed some features in some wifi cams I had years ago. It used to work like most others where it would detect movement and record a 30 second clip. Somewhere along the way that became a paid subscription only feature. Should have never updated that firmware...
I'm using reolink now for doorbell and will probably stick to them and other such brands going forward. poe of course too since all battery based cams suck in comparison (no live streaming capability or preroll recording before detection, needing regular charging). Wifi units are kind of crappy too compared to poe. Running cable is kind of satisfying in a strange way imo.
The truth is a lot of consumers do because they trust companies. Companies are happy to convert that trust into a few hundredths of a point on a quarterly statement.
My "smart" thermostat was past being supported when I bought it from Home Depot, lol, I put back the mercury switch thingie from 60 years ago because I had no idea how to get rid of it anyway.
I don’t understand the appeal of smart home devices. My Honeywell thermostat may not be as optimal as the nest but I’ve had it for thirty years and it just works without thought.
So, this will happen to ANYTHING that requires a server that you don't control eventually, including cars, smart-anything, smarthome stuff etc. I find this quite obvious to be true, yet the market seems to ignore this, from the consumer and manufacturers side. Why is that?
A rule of thumb when dealing with anything Google: never become too reliant on anything made by Google. They tend to depreciate almost everything eventually.
It’s far easier to open a new tab than it is to change a thermostat, which also isn’t that hard… I still think google is doing itself and the rest of us a disservice when they don’t facilitate off-boarding or continuation of services that would be trivially cheap to maintain.
I wonder what year they’ll sunset Gmail. Nothing is forever, surely some PM in 2033 will decide that email is over and it’s time to push everyone to Gemini Messenger.
I’ve been trying to move away from gmail for some critical services (like banking) for this reason. But my list of random accounts tied to gmail (like the Parisian métro keeps growing).
Well, that’s disgusting. But not even the worst case.
That’s just today’s nonsense tacked on to tomorrow’s tool.
I’m talking about Apple and OpenAI having all your context and an ads-baked-in system where you work out hard on Thursday and on Friday as you are passing by a advertising-buyer ice cream shop that your phone tells you that you earned whatever flavor it knows you like.
A Nest E thermostat and a video doorbell came with the house.
Already replaced the doorbell with a Eufy, but I'll ride the thermostat into the ground, which might be around 6 years at this rate.
Another hurdle is that the Nest thermostat is tied into the local electricity co-op's peak-time usage reduction rebate program. They currently only support by Google (Nest), ecobee, Amazon, and Honeywell.
Imagine if Google, which presents itself as a supporter of open source, had clear support policies so that when it ended support for a product, the open source community could take over. Think about how much e-waste that could prevent and how quickly it could make Google the default recommendation.
At this point I’ve thrown out so much Google hardware that was end of life but still operating I’ve become just the opposite — I constantly suggest people don’t use their hardware.
Worse are all these home-automation IoT devices etc. that "need" to re-route and ping servers outside even to get commands sent from devices on the same subnet! How absurd is this design ?
This ads-ification and "productization" of the user is the bane of tech industry. Such a scummy practice...
My 92 year old mom still lives in the house we moved into in 1965. It still has the original thermostat. And it’ll probably keep working another 60 years.
I'm gonna flip a table, our Nest 2nd gen I got for my girlfriend was a gift and we love it so much, she had always wanted one. We bought newer ones and they were complete trash so we went back to it. It has been such a struggle even dealing with everything after Google acquired them. We are exiting the Google thermostat Home Assistant world and never looking back. Way to ruin another quality thing you assholes.
OTOH, lack of ongoing support means a greatly diminished, but not eliminated, risk that they push a firmware update in the middle of an extreme weather event, disabling your hvac and endangering the occupants lives.
While I agree with the message, I think honesty is important. The Nest gen 3 was released in 2015[1]. People got a 10-14 years out of these devices.
Also, that posts says the thermostat will still work locally so the failure state of the "smart" device here is that it became a "dumb" device after a decade+.
As an entity looking to replace your existing, working devices you have a social contract to not break things and force me to do yet another round of research to replace your device.
One device is a pain. When you have a smart fridge, dishwasher, sonos, doorbell, smart lock, etc: the mean time to corporate abandonment gets very short.
I have an Ecobee, and for sure I’m looking to get off of that ecosystem once I’m forced to.
It also feels like Ecobee is an abandoned project at this stage: I get a 500 error trying to get a dev token, and portions of the app have been broken the entire time I’ve had one (9 years, 2 devices).
It’s still unacceptable. We should all be demanding legislation that requires code and/or hardware specs be open-sourced when they reach end of life. Otherwise, we’re simply continuing to be irresponsible by creating fast fashion in technology, enabling products to be designed for a short life and destined for the landfill simply because companies only care about quarterly profits and have no accountability.
in what world is a mere 10-14 years anywhere nesr acceptable?
Mx parents home that was bzild in the 80s still has the original thermostats and I expect they will not replace them in theor lifetime. And this is not an exception, its the rule and should stay like that
Top level said 25-50 years. 14 sounds like a lot if you fixate on the bottom end of the scale.
I’ve seen house thermostats that were so old they were starting to embrittle from ozone and UV damage. That’s more like 40+ years.
Also as someone else pointed out, the Nests are typically at least 2-3 times the cost of a normal thermostat. True, they eventually pay for themselves, but that money still went to Nest instead of PG&E.
My current thermostat is older than Nest, Google, and all of the founders of each of those companies. I can still get repair parts for it. It has the schematics printed on the inside of the case in case I can't get repair parts for it one day. A bad investment is a bad investment, even if there are mitigating factors.
And, it’s just a thermostat. When they first came out it was a little novel. Not anymore.
Temperature is a solved problem and algorithm.
There’s no real reason to discontinue them - they do the same thing they always have, connected to the same shared infrastructure.
I highly doubt the cost of cloud, tech increased or decreased since then.
It feels like a form of forced planned obsolescence. Maybe some growth or product folks not hitting their bonus lol.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 were unique also don’t have microphones in them. I know Gen 2 handled microbursting well not sure about other gens.
The truth is the cloud is someone else’s computer and the cloud always costs someone else, if not the customer.
Maybe nests aren’t being replaced fast enough or new nest purchases aren’t growing like before due to other options.
I won’t trust or buy any more Nest devices again or trust the brand. I buy newer Nest devices and cycle them out.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 folks were early adopters and they can find more elsewhere.
There are lots of other better options.
It’s easy to go early adopt the next thing. Home automation has come a long way and those who are trying to earn in the past risk being left in the past.
The device will work locally but api is being removed so the mobile app won’t work and neither will any home automation integrations.
The least they could do is just let people control it directly. We’ll see if it gets unlocked now.
We don't have to be exact or pedantic. Whatever the original purchase date for individual purchases, I guarantee they are closer to a decade ago than a year ago.
EDIT: That comment was heavily expanded after I replied. It was originally only about the distinction of purchase date. I won't debate the rest of the comment because as I said at the start, "While I agree with the message...". I just don't think this specific case is a particularly good example of what is being argued and therefore arguing it is probably counterproductive.
And if they still work mechanically after a decade, they shouldn't stop working because the company wants you to do another purchase. My Pi 3 is 9 years old and there's no reason it shouldn't continue to work until it mechanically doesn't.
Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years? The original price might have been 600 USD. I think the answer is regulation. Another idea: Sell the IP to a separate company who will support the legacy product for a fee. The original product will tell you how many years support is included (not lifetime). Later, there may be monthly charges. I doubt you will like that idea, but it is more honest. Germany has similar rules about car parts. Car manufs are required to make replacement parts available for X years after a car is manuf'd.
> Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years?
Sounds like Nest/Google didn’t think about that when they priced their products. That’s not the consumer’s fault. I’ve been de-Google-ing myself over the past couple of years and this is the final nail in the coffin. They could have given a partial refund, instead they insult customers with a “discount”.
Still 1,000 times better than a dumb device if I can change the temp from my phone without getting out of bed and walking down the stairs and set a schedule on it from my phone rather than navigating the ridiculous UI every dumb thermostat with a schedule function has.
Make sure that if you buy such a device it doesn’t do over the air upgrades. I bought a smart baby monitor (miku) that promised no monthly fees. Then they went bankrupt. A new company was formed that bought the assets. They disabled most functionality via forced over the air update then added a fee to enable the previously free functionality.
Louis Rossman would love to hear from you. Here's a recent video where he covers the exact same situation as you with another company where the purchasing company disables functionality behind a subscription.
And is actively trying to prevent hackers from running stuff locally.
Not the person you are asking. I'm partial to all Shelly stuff. So far very reliable and the price is ok. They do have a cloud but it is entirely optional.
What are the best ways of finding such devices? Almost all the time when I look into some product it ends up being connected to some random cloud service with its own login.
HomeAssistant supports a bunch of home automation systems, including local-only ones like ZWave and Zigbee*. A search for "zwave thermostat" comes up with a lot of results, though I couldn't say how difficult it might be to configure them (I'm only using simpler devices like switches and sensors).
* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.
One way is to look for devices that have unofficial firmware available, so you can just overwrite the included software for something more under your control. For example, check out Tasmota, "an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices": https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
My mom had these. After 25 years they started rapidly cycling the furnace which burned out line 3 ignitors in rapid succession. Now replaced with smarter digital but not networked ones that throttle it a bit more.
And when it finally dies and is disposed of, the mercury in the internal (ingenious) mechanism will likely end up in the wild. P.s. They came in colors? I only ever saw them in tan, which virtually everyone had half a century ago.
It's only the networked features that are being discontinued. You can still use the Nest as a "dumb" thermostat. Assuming you wanted a smart thermostat, surely a smart thermostat that reverts to being a dumb thermostat after 10-15 years is better than a dumb thermostat.
That’s no excuse to disable functionality on perfectly good devices.
Imagine if a company disabled your freezer after 10 years and told you “hey a refrigerator and freezer that reverts to a refrigerator after 10 years is better than a refrigerator!”
It's funny you should mention that because years ago, I did own a mini-fridge with a freezer section, and after a few years the freezer stopped working. I was still glad to have had it while it lasted.
The first thing I did when I bought my house was remove the Ring camera, but I left the keycode entry for the front door in place. Long story short, a few months later it locked me out of the house and shortly after I replaced it with a regular lock and key. Never again.
> "Smart Local Control" home devices work as expected until the electronics fail
Recently one of my Zigbee-controlled thermostats started pumping cold air constantly. To fix it, all I had to do was open and examine the board; one of the varistors got some battery acid on it when I had an alkaline battery burst in the unit. Because it was a no-name with an actual PCB, I was able to solder a new varistor in place, and it works good as new.
So I would say that "Smart Local Control" isn't the problem, but rather the ability to repair the thing. Also, the thermostat was $45 when I purchased it 5 years ago, so it was a good investment IMO. I think that's why everyone is upset about the Nest gen 1 and 2 sunsetting; there should be no reason that these devices should be breaking now (no failing electronics) but they die anyway because the company is too cheap to keep an extra endpoint running.
2. That the electronics were designed with appropriate thermal management so they don't fry themselves quickly. Smart bulbs are the most notorious offenders here, but the problem is widespread.
Google have the gaul to "offer" their newer devices at a discount - yes I want to pay you again for something I've already paid for...trusting that you don't this again in 10 years. I have 3 of these devices.
"an email from Google stating that they are no longer it's going to support the Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats. While they will continue to operate locally, it appears that they will no longer work with the Nest app or Home app controls."
at least they dont seem to be planning a mass bricking.
From what I understand it just means the app will no longer work for that thermostat. All the other features that you access from the device itself should still work. At least that's how it was presented to me on the Nest app.
Can you access smart features on the device itself? Like program in schedules or whatever? Or does the device itself more or less just let you set a target temperature without the app
>Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?
Serious answer: I do not expect any specific lifetime at all (though legal return period is an obvious floor), but at a bare minimum I do expect (and think should absolutely be mandated by law) that power be intimately tied to responsibility. Ie., it's fine if a hardware vendor decides to retire their cloud services (or OS updates or the like) in 1 year or 10 years or 20 or 30, but IF they cease to support it, THEN they must also remove any technical obstacles to hardware owners pointing it at another service of any kind. So any signing keys required, code, docs/APIs etc. Decide that a given product no longer makes commercial sense for you to produce or support? Sure, fine, it happens. The problem is then ensuring the hardware/software dies with that.
The basic issue is that these places generally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the financial power of a monopoly tie-in and feudal rent extraction, but no responsibilities to go with it and the ability to force customers onto new stuff (or nothing). That should be illegal. Honestly, I think any tie-in should be illegal, fully accessible local APIs should be required and any 1st party subscription should earn its place on its merits.
But at a minimum, no one should be able to have it both ways. If they want power over their customers, they should have responsibility proportional to that. And conversely if they go full open source community friendly hackable from day 1 (and are fully upfront about that), I'm fine saying they have very minimal long term responsibility. There can and should be room for many different approaches to the market, but not extractive lock-in.
When it's a device intended to be installed permanently in a house that could last 100 years, controlling a device that could last 20-30 years, and the company still exists (and is worth trillions to boot), I think 30 years of support would be a completely reasonable expectation.
I don’t know how these were advertised when originally sold, but I think products like these ought to clearly display a minimum sever lifetime. Something like “Nest connected thermostat, with 10 years of guaranteed cloud connectivity” displayed relatively prominently on the packaging. Otherwise, if the vendor can arbitrarily remotely yank access to a key feature, then the consumer is being sold a false bill of goods.
Products are not services. If you buy a product that needs services to work, and at the time of purchase you are clearly informed that those services are subject to change at any time, you are sufficiently aware of the fact that product functionality may change at any time.
You’re still in the return window when you are presented with the service ToS.
We’re retiring something like this at work. The devices were manufactured between 2009-2017. They will continue to operate in non-smart mode until some other part of the device breaks. We’ve notified customers and no one seems particularly upset. To a large degree it seems like the fleet’s obsolete and we could’ve pulled the plug a couple years ago. There’s probably not a good answer in a general sense. It really depends on a host of things.
As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item.
Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful
This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the tech space ever. You make it make sense.
As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item.
Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful
This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the IT space ever. You make it make sense.
liftime of the building it is installed in. if I choose to replace it that is fine but there are still buildings in use 1000 years later, you need to escrow enough to support servers that long just in case.
I know they used to be Home Assistant capable but required an API key which they will no longer give out. Seems like no fully local control to me. I believe my app stops working when the Internet goes out but it's been a bit.
Oh really? Weird. I did need to do some developer API key thing to get mine in HA, and it's awesome. All sensors and controls work great[1].
Since it's Homekit compatible though, you can go that route. HA easily discovers anything HK compatible as soon as you connect it to your network. So you connect Ecobee to HA with the HomeKit protocol in lieu of connecting it with Apple's stuff.
[1] ...and anything's better than the asinine on-device UI that Ecobee "updated" to a couple years ago (ask yourself: what would a foolish inexperienced "uX dEsIgNeR" do to ruin a plain old thermostat UI? It's that.)
same here. had 2 nests and 2 ecobees. the only ecobee quirk i find after 9 years of ecobees is that the weather calculation is way off if you live near microclimates. i'm not sure if they use your postal zipcode, or use a map from IP address to more accurate weather, but it's normally showing weather from 10 miles away.
My wife can ask google home for the weather forecast and it is correct. I ( the account holder ) can ask it when right beside her and it will provide weather prediction for a location 30km away.
I was really disappointed with the lack of analytics / historical data.
Thankfully the open source beetstat makes ecobee a lot more useful, with full history and graphs for heat/cool runtime, aux heat, indoor/outdoor humdity, etc
We try to avoid predictability on HN, which means we don't always need there to be someone making this comment every time Google sunsets a product. Yes, Google has shut down a lot of products. They've also launched a lot of products. It doesn't need a comment like this each time. Comments are always fine if they're thoughtful and substantive, but this kind of comment isn't one of those.
I am surprised they weren’t already killed. Switched to Ecobee after the acquisition. I gave my friend my Nest. A year later there was a software problem, Google was like, it’s old, buy a new one. Glad I ditched it.
Only if you look at appliance official support windows. In terms of energy consumption, efficiency, noise, storage area, weight, and regular maintenance modern appliances are pretty amazing.
my car is from 1999 and I can still keep it working. I replaced a perfectly working furnace from 1973 a couple years ago (nearly double the efficiency). I still use my 1939 tractor and can get parts for it. I have plenty of other appliances older than that - many modern ones don't work as well
Kind of an apples and oranges comparison though. Analog and simple digital thermostats are very simple while something like the nest is running 32-bit OS. Complexity increases cost.
Not really. The BOM of a smart thermostat is nearly equal to a dumb one right now. What adds cost is reliability. Hardware reliability costs engineering time and expensive component choices. Software reliability requires engineering resources and a mindset beyond optimizing quarterly returns.
There is no legitimate reason a fancy thermostat should be e-waste after ten years.
https://www.sinopetech.com/en/collections/temperature-contro...
I replaced all my thermostats for both of my homes with Sinopé products. Smart, allows integration with locally hosted home automation, and compatible with ZigBee networks. Purchased my first batch in late 2021 and haven't had any issues. Physical temperature controls if the LAN goes offline. Highly recommend.
Here's the hardware installed for on-prem home automation using the open-source Home Assistant software:
* Raspberry Pi[1] CPU, heatsink, A/C adapter, and case
* ConBee II Zigbee USB gateway[2]
* USB ADATA Micro SD card reader and USB cable
* Micro SD card (for operating system and Home Assistant)
* Ethernet cable (optional if using onboard WiFi)
There's a tutorial walking through the setup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEwrSSFe9s
It takes a little more labour to make it remotely accessible via smart phone, but once you have it locally hosted, that world is your oyster.
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
[2]: https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2
Same for myself. Sinooé devices are extremely solid (at least the Zigbee ones I've used) and work perfectly with Home Assistant. Would highly recommend.
Nice, thanks, I was curious what kind of zigbee thermostats are out there. Great to hear a positive anecdote about one!
I always check out the list at Zigbee2MQTT for compatible devices: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/
This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant. Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I've got the faceplate PCB done and working; the rotary encoder and ring working; and the display working but with terrible code with a low refresh rate.
I need to ship at the end of October to beat the retirement date. Plans to get some regular development report-outs and pre-orders are coming quite soon.
It's open source, and uses ESP32-C6 so it can be Wifi, BLE, or Zigbee, whatever software you intend to load onto it.
What language are you writing in? I recently did some rotary encoder work for a round display on an ESP32, and found the dev kit micro python stuff to be terribly slow. I’ve had good luck with LVGL in C++, and my “ick” feelings about c++ are pretty much totally resolved by a healthy dose of AI chat bots.
Send me an email if you’re interested in more info.
Do you have a link?
Very close to having one! I've been working on getting a blog published and a store to pre-order the finished product. I'll reply back here with the link when it's ready.
I got burned recently by Ecobee in the same way. The problem with 'smart' interfaces for traditionally mechanical devices is that the useable lifetime (support period) of low-end microprocessors and software, especially online APIs, is often far shorter than the mechanical device it's attached to.
Similar to how people that keep cars around for 10+ years are stuck with dated and worthless 'infotainment' systems, Google and Ecobee can't even honor their product for long enough to outlast the HVAC units.
What burns me is that it wouldn't be much of an ask for them to push one final (optional) update that would open LAN-only access to core functionality. I and many others in the HA/ESPHome community have written hardware integrations to devices over RS485/UART with unpublished/black-box protocols, so a simple HTTP API would have an integration within days.
It would maybe cost an engineer at Nest/Ecobee a day or two of work, and the goodwill would make me far more likely to purchase a newer model. As it is, I've committed to avoiding (where possible) devices that aren't local-first.
As an early Nest employee who worked on the first-gen thermostat I can tell you definitively that you're way off base here. That doesn't mean that Google shouldn't have done more to keep these units alive (and indeed that's one of the reasons I left Google). But these devices were designed in 2010-11. Even keeping the Linux kernel up to date with the latest version is a major undertaking. Adding major functionality like Matter compatibility, or even a simple (but secure!) local API, would take a seasoned engineering team a considerable amount of time.
That said, investing in devices that are local first is certainly good advice, provided the APIs are open and well supported.
Absolutely nothing is stopping Google from keeping all the integrations working until the thermostats physically break. No one asked for a new kernel and whatnot.
Is keeping alive the infrastructure that servers the 1st and 2nd generation devices online and just proxy the communication between the old features and new features available in HomeKit and other smart home hub apps such as big undertaking that Google balked at it?
Recent extreme frustration with Google products in mind, I'm tempted to read the crux of this post as, "Google engineers/designers are incompetent." It might be unfair, but on a day when Google Search, Youtube History Search, and (whaddya know) my Nest Thermostat have all failed me, the temptation is strong.
> Recent extreme frustration with Google products in mind, I'm tempted to read the crux of this post as, "Google engineers/designers are incompetent."
Engineers don’t make business decisions on when to end support, that’s a management decision; engineers ideally ought to be consulted on what it would take to continue support, but even that isn’t guaranteed. If planned obsolescence has been a business strategy, literally having an obsolescence switch and pulling the trigger on it has to be tempting to certain decision-makers even when support would be practical.
I think the reality is that the engineers are competent but this was just not a priority they were given and they were not going to spend nights making this happen instead of hanging out with their kids.
They might even have gotten in trouble if they had rolled out an update that product management didn't ask for and is perceived to reduce incentive to upgrade to a new device
If I’m a Google engineer, what motivation do I have to make decisions that keep a device running for a decade?
Even more pertinent, when it gets time to go through the promo process and when I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs, why would I want to be on a project supporting old legacy tech that I can’t spin to show how it helped the company’s revenue?
I’ve never worked for Google. But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech.
And even worse, every company is focused on “AI” these days. If you aren’t part of an initiative that can be said to be AI adjacent, if you care about your career and comp, you shouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261488
> If I’m a Google engineer, what motivation do I have to make decisions that keep a device running for a decade?
Empathy and being a good human being in relation to society. Making devices that look good at first and cause pain later, when it's too late to do anything about it... is bad.
> I need to prove “impact” and make sure what I’m doing is aligned with the department wide OKRs
Fair, and that's a reason to _not_ put in the effort to make longer lasting devices.
> But incentives based on the promo culture is endemic to all of BigTech
And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
Say the employee did want to work on the product in spite of it not being in their best interest. How are they going to get the buy in and the team to make the change and the support to get it pushed to devices in the field?
And no one works for a privacy invading ad tech company because they want to make the world a better place. It’s purely about making a shit ton of money.
> And we should be calling them out for it. It's bad in the same way that forced ranking systems are bad; they promote the wrong things.
Despite the newest LP about being the best employer, Amazon has been the shittiest of the BigTech employer as long as I can remember. Their reputation hasn’t changed anything about their profitability or stock price.
Before you ask if I knew that, why did I work there. I was 46 at the time, it was my 8th job out of 10 and it was purely remote and a “field by design role” that was remote until a year after I left. It was purely a money and resume play.
I would expect a thermostat to last 15+ years across multiple home owners - it should be an improvement over a mechanical one, after all. If that's not adding to Google's bottom line, they shouldn't have "disrupted" that market in the first place.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
I am bit confused by this post.
Let me turn it around. Imagine that you are a Google engineer who worked on Search, YouTube, or Nest. How would you feel reading your own post? You would probably vehemently disagree! I'm not sure your sentiment is relative in 2025. Everyone on HN knows that any "web scale" public product (with billions of users) 100s of engineers behind it. And, it takes very good ones to keep them running and continuously improve them.
Thus, in response to:
I say: Yes, it is unfair and unnecessary to post. It adds very little to the wider discussion.Security is always the excuse, but it's a local device connected to Wifi. Add a setting to the existing menus that is opt in to turn on the new API.
Beyond that, there's what, like 4 or 5 parameters that are useful to set, and a few that can be read. It wouldn't be necessary to over engineer the API, even a few simple, fixed TCP packets to query state and set the basic parameters like mode, fan, room and set temp would be all that is needed. It can be ugly and basic, just release the info and other devs would run with it.
For example, the older TPLink Kasa line of smart devices have a simple TCP packet protocol for local control. The 'security' was easily reverse engineered (simple key autokey cipher), but there wasn't any outrage. Their simple scheme that wasn't meant to be widely known meant it was possible for others to build the integrations.
https://www.softscheck.com/en/blog/tp-link-reverse-engineeri...
First, thank you for posting. Insiders can provide unique persepectives.
Dumb question: Why does an old Nest need an updated Linux kernel? Do you have any examples that could sufficiently replace old Nests?"Why does an old Nest need an updated Linux kernel?"
Old versions that no longer receive security updates is a major issue
For general purpose computing - yes.
For a thermostat, with presumably an attack surface that could be made arbitrarily small (albeit by removing non essential features) -why?
Surely this means all embedded devices are a serious liability?
> a simple (but secure!) local API
A bit of an unusual idea, but: if the users of such a thing are folks who're already playing with HA and are tech savvy, why not just expose the API and tell users that they're "only allowed to use the "hacker's update in good faith" if they put the devices on a separate network without internet access?
Your team doesn't need to spend a ton of time on making it super secure, and DIYers can continue to use the hardware for as long as it physically works, me thinks
Liability.
Isn't this exactly what the mountain of liability waivers already included in the ToS are for?
Not a lawyer, but liability waivers may not apply if there is determined to be gross negligence or recklessness.
Making a reasonably-designed API available, only if connected to an inaccessible network, doesn't sound dangerous, but the goodwill gained might be hard to weigh against a miniscule chance of malware, which would revise everyone's opinion of the degree of negligence or recklessness.
"Even keeping the Linux kernel up to date with the latest version is a major undertaking."
To me this sounds always backward. We make a choice of tools, and now we can't support you longer, and blame it on the tools. It's like "I need a car because I've moved out of the city center." Yes, of course you need a car, but because of your choices and actions.
If you prioritize easier development over long term support when choosing tools, then this is what you get.
Of course it's ok and valid to make that tradeoff, but then don't blame it on the tools, but on your choices.
Okay, but isn’t this really about, why should Google spend money making things work better for iPhone users? It doesn’t like doing that. That’s what Matter support is really about. It’s always been about Apple Home.
And before you accuse me of being “way off base” lemme ask you: why doesn’t Gmail support push for iOS Mail anymore?
> What burns me is that it wouldn't be much of an ask for them to push one final (optional) update that would open LAN-only access to core functionality.
The last dev who understands the code and the build tooling left years ago.
At least HVAC systems have a mostly standard control system and thermostats are easy to swap out. If a thermostat goes out of support and looses functionality, you do not need to replace the entire HVAC system; only the relatively cheap thermostat.
I'm contrast, while it is often possible to replace an infotainment system, the replacement needs to have been designed for a fairly specific set of cars, and actually installing it requires paying a mechanic for most people.
If your car is old enough to have a standard DIN radio, you can easily replace it with a modern CarPlay/Android Auto unit. And cars that are new enough to have CarPlay/Android Auto built in seem to be generally holding up. It’s really just cars from a specific window (after they started putting nav systems and screens, before adopting CarPlay) that age really badly.
In the early 2000s, even cars with oddball radios (like a CD slot adjacent to climate controls for example) could have an aftermarket head unit installed because dash trim kits were available to replace the proprietary layout with a DIN slot. Is this not the case for the era you mentioned?
> Similar to how people that keep cars around for 10+ years are stuck with dated and worthless 'infotainment' systems, Google and Ecobee can't even honor their product for long enough to outlast the HVAC units
I would never buy a car that doesn’t support CarPlay. The four protocols that Apple created to interface with non Apple devices - the original iPod protocol, AirPrint, AirPlay and CarPlay haven’t had any breaking changes. As of at least three years ago, I could use an old first gen iPad from 2010 (the first to support AirPlay/Airprint) and use it with modern Roku TVs with AirPlay support and modern printers.
My old 2011 Sonic that I had with a USB port that supported the iPod protocol for displaying titles for audio and controlling iPods still worked with every iPhone I had.
But I would never trust Google not to kill a device.
I don’t get who uses Nest or other non-first party thermostats anymore:
All modern furnaces/ACs/heat pumps require their own smart thermostat to work optimally. So if you install Bryant furnace, you end up with Bryant smart thermostat, and so on. In fact, when choosing new furnace/AC choose brand with good software in thermostat first and foremost - units themselves are pretty identical otherwise.
That really isn’t true. I have a split level heat pump with no thermostat, well, there is one in the remote control that sets a mini thermostat on each internal unit. Basically, we don’t have a central thermostat but that isn’t weird for Seattle.
Incidentally, I would love for a better remote control that was easier to use, we might use our heat pump more than a couple of weeks a year in that case.
I got lucky with my 2011 Toyota because the inputs are standard Bluetooth, an aux port, and iPod-style USB. The display is also a VFD pixel display and not some crappy LCD with a resistive touchscreen.
Of course, new devices might use some incompatible Bluetooth standard in the future.
I assume it means
- You connect directly to the device to tell it what to do
vs
- You connect to some service at google/whatever that then tells your device what to do.
The former still works after google/whatever decide not to support/host the service that handles that.
> It would maybe cost an engineer at Nest/Ecobee a day or two of work
I think you misspelled a _year_ or two of work. Especially with the scrutiny that comes with software written at a major corp like Google.
Connected thermostats are great in theory! But they should not have to rely on a cloud connection. A local network with the option of internet connectivity would be awesome; but, it seems, no company is going to become uber successful if there isn't the option of forced upgrades and cloud subscriptions. Look at Ring...
Honeywell's z-wave thermostat basically does all of the shiny shit you'd want out of a connected thermostat while making basically impossible to lock the user out because Honeywell decided it didn't like the product anymore. Why people have to keep relearning this with IoT devices baffles me, and that Z-wave or maybe Zigbee isn't what's insisted upon.
If you're VC-funded then the valuation is the most important thing. The only way to juice your valuation is to get recurring revenue, because it comes with an 8x to 10x multiple. So you don't want to be in the hardware game, you want to use hardware to get a foothold in someone's home and then get them to pay you a subscription to maintain that hardware.
I think the valuation thing is what drives 90% of this stuff. Whereas an established company like Honeywell is more interested in building products and selling a lot of them, so they're going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation instead of a cloud-first implementation.
I don't think I would ever buy a hardware product from a company billing themselves as a VC-backed startup.
Also, FWIW the Nest is a perfectly functional thermostat even if you never hook it up to their app. We found the scheduling and learning features to be really annoying so we turned them all off and never connected ours to the cloud.
I agree almost entirely, but I gotta quibble a point:
> so [companies like Honeywell] are going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation
"Established" companies also see the long-term value of subscriptions and are also hopping on that bandwagon.
Additionally, customers are extremely sensitive to up-front price, so a product that's more expensive up-front but with no subscription fee and longer-term value will have trouble finding a foothold in the market compared to cheaper but subscription-based alternatives. Especially if the alternatives are "1 year free!" as they usually are.
> Whereas an established company like Honeywell is [...] going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest
A Nest is ~$150, so I'm curious where these $750-1500 thermostats are...
Seems like you get a Honeywell thermostat for almost exactly the same price, if you don't care about cloud connectivity.
Just because someone found them annoying doesn’t mean others do.
Nests performed well in unique spaces with different heating and cooling profiles, not to mention different kinds of shoulder seasons.
I bought a $20 Zigbee thermostat from AliExpress and it has been fantastic. It turns on when it's cold, and off when it's hot. Anything else, I can do with software, because it's just Zigbee.
I go for Zwave by choice but Zigbee comes a close second. It does share 2.4GHz with wifi but its many tiny bands fit within the "edges" of the wifi bands. If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily. Even if you don't, it will still work fine - the messages are tiny.
Both Zwave and Zigbee build mesh networks with multiple routes. Wifi devices ... don't. Wifi is fine for IoT but it isn't optimised for it. My fridge/freezer uses wifi as does my oven and microwave. It doesn't matter if they lose comms sometimes and there is no choice anyway.
My light switches are Zwave. Thanks to way modern UK wiring is done, most of my switches end up with an extra conductor and so are permanently powered and act as hubs for the battery powered window sensors and the like.
My cameras are all PoE ethernet, including the door bell. All Reolink.
I have two UPSs with at least 30 mins run time. I could easily put in a genny or a battery or even use my car (EV) but its not important enough (yet). So far everything will work without the internet.
I have deployed two VLANS for IoT - THINGS, and SEWER for the really worrying gear on it!
Home Assistant runs the show.
> If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily.
I worked for a company that converted a legacy wire protocol with no QoS guarantees to be used over a proprietary modification of Zigbee. One of the managers complained that their volume control would randomly climb to the max loudness. The protocol used press/release packets for button presses and if the volume-up release packet was lost due to interference, you got a runaway increase in volume from the system assuming it was still held down. This usually happened when the channel assignment was in a band used for active wifi.
Plenty of companies are successfull and don't rely on forced cloud. Reolink for example. Plenty of others.
The real difference is that these are not american sv vc backed companies like nest or ring. they are chinese companies set on disrupting those vc backed companies using this local first mindset as the differentiator.
No forced cloud should be a home automation feature that’s advertised and reviewed.
It usually is for those companies. Reolink for example are pretty proud of their local first subscription free model in their product advertising.
My Insteon thermostat is a great dumb thermostat that I can also send commands to over a serial connection to a powerline/RF modem. (Very similar to Z-Wave's RF, though proprietary.)
The key is do not buy smart devices with Wi-Fi. There are better products for serious people. Everyone here with a Zigbee or Z-Wave product probably learned that the hard way first. ;)
EcoBee is happy to work without WiFi.
They are so shady about this stuff
I have a Honeywell t6 that I got when they installed a new unit - Honeywell INSISTS that you create an account and download the app to connect it to your home network
Thankfully this is bullshit and you can connect it directly from the thermostat to HomeKit - you will not find a single piece of documentation on this though and will be told it’s not possible
The real kicker is that there is a notification to register your device that you can’t get rid of unless you register your device
You can only snooze it for a couple weeks at a time
How I’d love to have one on one conversations with the evil people who approve this type of crap
Anything that requires a cloud account and does not offer a self hosted option, even a limited one, should be considered throw away. Would be nice if google released a self hosted server for these as a nod and thanks to the early customers.
Or just open up a little JSON server on the thermostat.
> Would be nice if google released a self hosted server
These mofos are too greedy to do this.
To each their own, but the idea of an internet connected thermostat (at great expense!) never made sense to me. A $20 Honeywell lets you program 4 regions per day (waking, day, evening, night) and will be fine almost every day of the year. Has a battery backup and never failed me.
I guess it would be cute to get some analytics dashboard, but that’s about where my interest ends.
I really appreciate mine. My big use case is that we go away for a week or two over winter sometimes and turn the house down to 55F. The radiators take quite a while to heat the house back up from that temperature, so I turn the temperature back up remotely the morning before we fly back.
That said, I'm quite annoyed that Google is nuking my perfectly functional thermostat, and I will be buying an Ecobee to replace it, and integrating it with home assistant.
So you use smart thermostat functionality once a year? What’s wrong with wearing jackets indoors for half a day once a year :)
55F is the temp I know a lot of people keep their house at in the winter. Mostly older poorly insulated homes where the bill will be absurd if they put it at 72*. Sweaters work. So do blankets.
the more likely case is they just leave it on normal when they are gone - like everyone else
It's expensive to run a propane-fueled indirect-fire boiler when you're not home.
In case you've never done it, let your house get into low 40's (F) and it takes days to warm up. The air gets warm fast, but your bed and the floor take a long time to warm up.
Well beyond a basic dumb thermostat I like that my EcoBee can use several wireless temperature sensors. During the day I have it set to only use the downstairs sensors and at night it only uses the upstairs sensors.
Can a $20 Honeywell thermostat do that with wireless sensors? If it can, I will get one.
The issue that the Nest solved for me was figuring out how long it took for the hot water to get to the radiators, and what the bounce looked like after it got there. It'll stop calling for heat before it reaches the final temp because it will still keep going up.
It doesn't need to be cloud-connected to do so, but that's not a feature I'm aware a $20 Honeywell has.
I used to have a Honeywell wi-fi thermostat. It looked like any other thermostat you've ever seen, except you could connect it to a home hub. It was nice because you could exactly what you're describing, but you could also do it in the app.
What made it worth it was being able to turn off the air or heat when you weren't home automatically. Now all or the "AI training" garbage? Yeah, forget that. I used to work in an office with a nest and it was torture if you showed up too early if stayed a little too late.
Everyone always says this stuff, but man these things are such garbage to use: terrible user interface, LCD screen with random blinking elements to tell you that's being edited, response rate slower than a ping to Mars. Modern app-connected thermostats are so much better.
I have the same thing and to be honest, if I had to replace a $200 thermostat every 2 years I would gladly do it. In fact, this whole thing has made me go and research which thermostat will fit where I live.
It's starting to look like when you buy any kind of electronics gizmo with a UI, your choices are limited to:
1. A non-smart device that will work forever but looks and feels like it's still in the 90s
2. A device with a nice, responsive UI, but destined for the landfill because it's chained to a cloud service.
Why are these things mutually exclusive? Across so many product categories, there's seemingly few or no options for a nice UI but without dependence on an Internet service that will inevitably shut down.
Because people won't pay (or the companies(' research) don't think they'll pay) much for the hardware, so it's a loss leader or barely profitable promotion for the subscription service.
Not that straightforwardly in Nest's particular case to be fair, but a lead in to other products, and Nest was perhaps bought by Google before having to worry too much about profit margins(?).
The key usecases for me are:
Adjusting the thermostat (which is downstairs) from bed.
At the airport - oh shit did I turn off the AC for the two weeks we'll be away? Ok I just did.
I got a Honeywell Sensi thermostat that can do that, and also works without an internet connection. Better things are possible.
Luckily, this can all be achieved using a Wi-Fi or (even better) a Z-Wave thermostat that is 100% locally-controlled using something like Home Assistant or any number of other solutions.
The guy I replied to was asking why you'd want an Internet connected thermostat.
I am a HA guy and prior to my ecobee I ran an American Radio Thermostat with local HA support and you could control over curl. But the wifi module was so old that no modern device connected to it when I had to reset it up.
But I agree zwave plus HA are a great option too.
Same. My Nest has probably paid for itself in terms of me being able to remotely disable it while away on trips
I like being able to adjust HVAC based on temperature sensors that are not co-located with the input keypad.
Being able to use the temp reading in a specific room is choice.
The shameful part is that the only thing that even remotely (no pun intended) needs a server to even be online, is the out-of-home control, just for NAT traversal. It should be free to Google for these to have at least in-home smart functionality forever.
Well, that, and the moving target of updating an "app" every year for all the breaking changes Google and (especially) Apple do to the mobile OS. Although honestly I'd rather have a QR code that links you to a PWA hosted on the thermostat itself.
I’m affected by this, and as pissed at Google about it as anyone, but the headline is overblown. The old Nest devices continue to function as thermostats, and the on-device features like scheduling still work. But I need the cloud-based features (particularly remote control via the app), so I went ahead and paid the upgrade tax.
Setting schedules on the devices ain't bad as on some "dumb" thermostats, but it's a real pain in the ass.
This should be pretty much true for every "connected" device out there. They should all have a mode that works by directly connecting over the local LAN. Why do device manufacturers refuse to support this configuration?
If I want to change the volume of my "smart speaker" from my phone that's also on my LAN, it shouldn't require a round trip to a server on the Internet, or an account with credentials, or any of that nutty stuff.
It’s crazy that Sonos used to* have local wifi mesh networking and they decided “the cloud is better”.
* technically still does, but they tried to switch before they backpedaled
This pisses me off to no end. I paid a lot... I expected my Nest gear to work for as long as I own my house. I paid extra to get someone to install it with my home system. Now I see that my Nest Protect is saying it needs to be changed... not some small module... the whole thing. Next will be my thermostats... I can't understand why I'd pay for them again.
Agreed, I bought into Google mesh Wi-Fi and they updated it to remove vlan bridging which made it useless for my ISP which required that. When I reached out they gaslit me awhile before saying yeah, we nerfed you, sucks for you.
Is there a list of devices which have been rescued or extended by open-source software?
Lyrion Music Server (formerly Logitech Media Server) is open-source server software for Squeezebox audio players, https://lyrion.org/
Tasmota is open-source firmware for ESP8266 and ESP32-based devices, https://templates.blakadder.com/preflashed-stand.html & https://github.com/tasmota
Some IP cameras have open firmware replacements.
Some Chromebooks are supported by mainline Linux.
you can buy these sensors off aliexpress cheap
API access is being ended as well, so third-party apps and services will not work.
I was hoping that at least my Home Assistant integration would keep working. That sucks terribly. Lesson of the day: Avoid any IoT device that you can't use without an external service.
FWIW, I replaced my Nests with Centralite Pearls a few years ago, and have been extremely happy with them WRT Home Assistant. The Pearl doesn't seem to be widely available anymore, but any Zwave or Zigbee thermostat + a local hub gets you a thermostat that should work with Home Assistant and will be immune to being sunsetted like this.
That's a good suggestion. Thanks!
Can someone at Google explain why the company can’t end formal support for the thermostat but make the API open? It’s a thermostat. It has 3 real functions - cool, heat, fan. What could it possibly hurt to let owners access the endpoints without touching Google servers?
But then the customer might not buy a new nest....
This assumes Google's servers are pushing to the thermostat. It seems more likely that the thermostats are pulling from Google's servers, so that they don't have to worry about firewalls.
NEST protect has been a thorn in my side. Aside from just completely eating batteries - it constantly has to reconnect.
I wish the internet of things was soo much better than it is. There was a dream once of a world that worked efficiently, and then profit models came in and destroyed it.
You’ve got to use the one specific brand and type of battery they insist on. It’s some energizer lithium thing I’ll have to check for you and comment later. Anything else fails very fast, the correct ones last for years.
That parallel universe exists its just on aliexpress.com not amazon.com. Cheap hardware and open protocols as promised.
As a wise man once said, “Anything plus computer equals computer.”
Marketing/brand question: How do brands like Google (Alphabet) get away with moves like breaking products like this?
Is it because they continue to offer valued other services?
Is it because the affected people of any untrustworthy move are acceptable casualties?
Is it because they've been cashing in goodwill created by earlier generations of leadership?
Something else?
Wyze is asking folks on Reddit if they’re willing to pay monthly for RTSP access.
I shied away from wyze when they killed some features in some wifi cams I had years ago. It used to work like most others where it would detect movement and record a 30 second clip. Somewhere along the way that became a paid subscription only feature. Should have never updated that firmware...
I'm using reolink now for doorbell and will probably stick to them and other such brands going forward. poe of course too since all battery based cams suck in comparison (no live streaming capability or preroll recording before detection, needing regular charging). Wifi units are kind of crappy too compared to poe. Running cable is kind of satisfying in a strange way imo.
I don't understand why anyone would buy these things. Any device that requires a connection to a remote server is doomed to being bricked sooner.
The truth is a lot of consumers do because they trust companies. Companies are happy to convert that trust into a few hundredths of a point on a quarterly statement.
If I am looking to get something that works with Home Assistant or esphome to replace my first gen nest thermostat, what should I get?
My "smart" thermostat was past being supported when I bought it from Home Depot, lol, I put back the mercury switch thingie from 60 years ago because I had no idea how to get rid of it anyway.
I don’t understand the appeal of smart home devices. My Honeywell thermostat may not be as optimal as the nest but I’ve had it for thirty years and it just works without thought.
Meanwhile, my old Honeywell thermostat is still working!
If you want IoT...ensure it's home assistant compatible.
They were barely "supported" by google at all. I've been locked out for years at this point
They must have found some really bad security issues in the old backend they can't fix, or something. It's a bad look.
So, this will happen to ANYTHING that requires a server that you don't control eventually, including cars, smart-anything, smarthome stuff etc. I find this quite obvious to be true, yet the market seems to ignore this, from the consumer and manufacturers side. Why is that?
A rule of thumb when dealing with anything Google: never become too reliant on anything made by Google. They tend to depreciate almost everything eventually.
When I bought my first Nest in 2012, Nest Labs was not yet part of Google (that acquisition came in 2014.)
So for the owners of Gen 1 and 2 thermostats, your rule of thumb isn’t helpful like it is for post 2014 purchases.
Deprecate*
But yes, this is why I'm staying away from Gemini. Seems like an amazing product! But no way am I putting my AI eggs in the Google basket.
It’s far easier to open a new tab than it is to change a thermostat, which also isn’t that hard… I still think google is doing itself and the rest of us a disservice when they don’t facilitate off-boarding or continuation of services that would be trivially cheap to maintain.
>Deprecate
Yes it was an unfortunate autocorrect and it’s now too late to fix it!
To be fair, it's not like the thermostat is worth as much after it's discontinued
I wonder what year they’ll sunset Gmail. Nothing is forever, surely some PM in 2033 will decide that email is over and it’s time to push everyone to Gemini Messenger.
I’ve been trying to move away from gmail for some critical services (like banking) for this reason. But my list of random accounts tied to gmail (like the Parisian métro keeps growing).
The day they finally deprecate Google Ads will be a good day.
The devil you know though.
The day the kill that, is the day a new hell is trust upon you.
As it were, appreciate the life you have right now that AI doesn’t have ads, it’s coming.
Future is around the corner it seems...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141343
Well, that’s disgusting. But not even the worst case.
That’s just today’s nonsense tacked on to tomorrow’s tool.
I’m talking about Apple and OpenAI having all your context and an ads-baked-in system where you work out hard on Thursday and on Friday as you are passing by a advertising-buyer ice cream shop that your phone tells you that you earned whatever flavor it knows you like.
Wave bye-bye!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
depreciate by deprecation
Only if they can enable local home assistant access !
A Nest E thermostat and a video doorbell came with the house.
Already replaced the doorbell with a Eufy, but I'll ride the thermostat into the ground, which might be around 6 years at this rate.
Another hurdle is that the Nest thermostat is tied into the local electricity co-op's peak-time usage reduction rebate program. They currently only support by Google (Nest), ecobee, Amazon, and Honeywell.
Is there a stated reason for this EOLing?
I'll venture a guess: https://youtu.be/W63bcKnmdqU
Imagine if Google, which presents itself as a supporter of open source, had clear support policies so that when it ended support for a product, the open source community could take over. Think about how much e-waste that could prevent and how quickly it could make Google the default recommendation.
At this point I’ve thrown out so much Google hardware that was end of life but still operating I’ve become just the opposite — I constantly suggest people don’t use their hardware.
Classic "internet-of-shit" material.
Worse are all these home-automation IoT devices etc. that "need" to re-route and ping servers outside even to get commands sent from devices on the same subnet! How absurd is this design ?
This ads-ification and "productization" of the user is the bane of tech industry. Such a scummy practice...
This crap is exactly why I do not ever purchase devices like these.
Yeah, I don't have a smart home, but all my old stuff works great and that will continue until after I have left this place.
Maybe I do have a smart home.
I feel so good about never connecting the previous owners' Nest to my WiFi.
My 92 year old mom still lives in the house we moved into in 1965. It still has the original thermostat. And it’ll probably keep working another 60 years.
I'm gonna flip a table, our Nest 2nd gen I got for my girlfriend was a gift and we love it so much, she had always wanted one. We bought newer ones and they were complete trash so we went back to it. It has been such a struggle even dealing with everything after Google acquired them. We are exiting the Google thermostat Home Assistant world and never looking back. Way to ruin another quality thing you assholes.
OTOH, lack of ongoing support means a greatly diminished, but not eliminated, risk that they push a firmware update in the middle of an extreme weather event, disabling your hvac and endangering the occupants lives.
"Dumb" home devices work as expected for 25-50 years, and then you replace them.
"Smart" home devices work as expected for about a year and then they fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them.
While I agree with the message, I think honesty is important. The Nest gen 3 was released in 2015[1]. People got a 10-14 years out of these devices.
Also, that posts says the thermostat will still work locally so the failure state of the "smart" device here is that it became a "dumb" device after a decade+.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Nest#Nest_Learning_Ther...
As an entity looking to replace your existing, working devices you have a social contract to not break things and force me to do yet another round of research to replace your device.
One device is a pain. When you have a smart fridge, dishwasher, sonos, doorbell, smart lock, etc: the mean time to corporate abandonment gets very short.
I have an Ecobee, and for sure I’m looking to get off of that ecosystem once I’m forced to.
It also feels like Ecobee is an abandoned project at this stage: I get a 500 error trying to get a dev token, and portions of the app have been broken the entire time I’ve had one (9 years, 2 devices).
It’s still unacceptable. We should all be demanding legislation that requires code and/or hardware specs be open-sourced when they reach end of life. Otherwise, we’re simply continuing to be irresponsible by creating fast fashion in technology, enabling products to be designed for a short life and destined for the landfill simply because companies only care about quarterly profits and have no accountability.
Future generations deserve better.
in what world is a mere 10-14 years anywhere nesr acceptable? Mx parents home that was bzild in the 80s still has the original thermostats and I expect they will not replace them in theor lifetime. And this is not an exception, its the rule and should stay like that
How much functionality does that original thermostat have?
Soon, the same (or more?) than 1sr/2nd gen Nests.
Now do how much they cost compared to the $250 + tax Nest charged.
> People got a 10-14 years out of these devices.
Thermostats generally last a lot longer than that.
Most of these Nest units continue to work perfectly well and could continue operating with a simple cloud service for many years.
Top level said 25-50 years. 14 sounds like a lot if you fixate on the bottom end of the scale.
I’ve seen house thermostats that were so old they were starting to embrittle from ozone and UV damage. That’s more like 40+ years.
Also as someone else pointed out, the Nests are typically at least 2-3 times the cost of a normal thermostat. True, they eventually pay for themselves, but that money still went to Nest instead of PG&E.
(Or a local connection! No need for cloud.)
My current thermostat is older than Nest, Google, and all of the founders of each of those companies. I can still get repair parts for it. It has the schematics printed on the inside of the case in case I can't get repair parts for it one day. A bad investment is a bad investment, even if there are mitigating factors.
Not quite logical.
Release years aren’t purchase years.
Everyone didn’t have the same purchase year.
And, it’s just a thermostat. When they first came out it was a little novel. Not anymore.
Temperature is a solved problem and algorithm.
There’s no real reason to discontinue them - they do the same thing they always have, connected to the same shared infrastructure.
I highly doubt the cost of cloud, tech increased or decreased since then.
It feels like a form of forced planned obsolescence. Maybe some growth or product folks not hitting their bonus lol.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 were unique also don’t have microphones in them. I know Gen 2 handled microbursting well not sure about other gens.
The truth is the cloud is someone else’s computer and the cloud always costs someone else, if not the customer.
Maybe nests aren’t being replaced fast enough or new nest purchases aren’t growing like before due to other options.
I won’t trust or buy any more Nest devices again or trust the brand. I buy newer Nest devices and cycle them out.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 folks were early adopters and they can find more elsewhere.
There are lots of other better options.
It’s easy to go early adopt the next thing. Home automation has come a long way and those who are trying to earn in the past risk being left in the past.
The device will work locally but api is being removed so the mobile app won’t work and neither will any home automation integrations.
The least they could do is just let people control it directly. We’ll see if it gets unlocked now.
We don't have to be exact or pedantic. Whatever the original purchase date for individual purchases, I guarantee they are closer to a decade ago than a year ago.
EDIT: That comment was heavily expanded after I replied. It was originally only about the distinction of purchase date. I won't debate the rest of the comment because as I said at the start, "While I agree with the message...". I just don't think this specific case is a particularly good example of what is being argued and therefore arguing it is probably counterproductive.
And if they still work mechanically after a decade, they shouldn't stop working because the company wants you to do another purchase. My Pi 3 is 9 years old and there's no reason it shouldn't continue to work until it mechanically doesn't.
Less about exact dates a few years apart can not be a decade.
I know this because I’ve bought a few, not sure about yourself.
Hope that helps.
As someone who bought 3 of these for $300 a pop I vehemently disagree. This is complete bullshit and anti-consumer behavior that should be illegal.
Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years? The original price might have been 600 USD. I think the answer is regulation. Another idea: Sell the IP to a separate company who will support the legacy product for a fee. The original product will tell you how many years support is included (not lifetime). Later, there may be monthly charges. I doubt you will like that idea, but it is more honest. Germany has similar rules about car parts. Car manufs are required to make replacement parts available for X years after a car is manuf'd.
> Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years?
Sounds like Nest/Google didn’t think about that when they priced their products. That’s not the consumer’s fault. I’ve been de-Google-ing myself over the past couple of years and this is the final nail in the coffin. They could have given a partial refund, instead they insult customers with a “discount”.
>I think honesty is important
Lol
Still 1,000 times better than a dumb device if I can change the temp from my phone without getting out of bed and walking down the stairs and set a schedule on it from my phone rather than navigating the ridiculous UI every dumb thermostat with a schedule function has.
Sure. If you need a device that does x, a device that does x for 1 month is better than one that doesn’t do x forever.
That’s no excuse for Google arbitrarily disabling functionality.
How often are you changing the temp or schedule? That seems like a once every few months type thing.
This is exactly why I’ve started only buying smart devices that work with Home Assistant and don’t rely on cloud services.
Make sure that if you buy such a device it doesn’t do over the air upgrades. I bought a smart baby monitor (miku) that promised no monthly fees. Then they went bankrupt. A new company was formed that bought the assets. They disabled most functionality via forced over the air update then added a fee to enable the previously free functionality.
Louis Rossman would love to hear from you. Here's a recent video where he covers the exact same situation as you with another company where the purchasing company disables functionality behind a subscription.
And is actively trying to prevent hackers from running stuff locally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66j9dsPhAjE
Isn’t that illegal? like under consumer law maybe?
Ditto. Landlord shoved ecobees onto us after their developer program shuttered, and when internet connected they misbehave.
Curious to hear what local polling or local push thermostat you settled on with HA support!
Not the person you are asking. I'm partial to all Shelly stuff. So far very reliable and the price is ok. They do have a cloud but it is entirely optional.
Ecobees (at least the model I have) can work without internet and integrate with Home Assistant.
What are the best ways of finding such devices? Almost all the time when I look into some product it ends up being connected to some random cloud service with its own login.
HomeAssistant supports a bunch of home automation systems, including local-only ones like ZWave and Zigbee*. A search for "zwave thermostat" comes up with a lot of results, though I couldn't say how difficult it might be to configure them (I'm only using simpler devices like switches and sensors).
* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.
The Honeywell Z-Wave thermostats are trivial to connect and work with via Home Assistant.
Source: I own one. :)
I own two and they are bulletproof with Home Assistant. When away from home I just wireguard in and adjust/monitor as needed.
One way is to look for devices that have unofficial firmware available, so you can just overwrite the included software for something more under your control. For example, check out Tasmota, "an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices": https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
It isn't easy, but you just have to do your due diligence and really explore the featuresets available for a given category of product.
A shortcut however is checking out the homelab subreddit. People will post about the gear they are using in their stack.
Ironically the latest Nest thermostats offer fully local control with Home Assistant via Matter.
Last I checked you have sign-in to Google before it lets you config via Matter
I have one of these: https://i.redd.it/629z71qmiq0c1.jpg
It will probably last over a century.
My mom had these. After 25 years they started rapidly cycling the furnace which burned out line 3 ignitors in rapid succession. Now replaced with smarter digital but not networked ones that throttle it a bit more.
My mom still has these. In gold. It has outlasted two boilers.
And when it finally dies and is disposed of, the mercury in the internal (ingenious) mechanism will likely end up in the wild. P.s. They came in colors? I only ever saw them in tan, which virtually everyone had half a century ago.
The ad mentions you can easily paint it, so I think it just came in "silver-bronze".
It's only the networked features that are being discontinued. You can still use the Nest as a "dumb" thermostat. Assuming you wanted a smart thermostat, surely a smart thermostat that reverts to being a dumb thermostat after 10-15 years is better than a dumb thermostat.
That’s no excuse to disable functionality on perfectly good devices.
Imagine if a company disabled your freezer after 10 years and told you “hey a refrigerator and freezer that reverts to a refrigerator after 10 years is better than a refrigerator!”
It's funny you should mention that because years ago, I did own a mini-fridge with a freezer section, and after a few years the freezer stopped working. I was still glad to have had it while it lasted.
My mercury bulb thermostat from 1966 still works.
> and then they fail in new and exciting ways
The first thing I did when I bought my house was remove the Ring camera, but I left the keycode entry for the front door in place. Long story short, a few months later it locked me out of the house and shortly after I replaced it with a regular lock and key. Never again.
Someone at the Cirius Cybernetics Corporation had a good laugh at you.
Yeah probably the AAA locksmith I had to call as well.
> "Smart Cloud" home devices work as expected for about a year and then they fail in new and exciting ways, and then you replace them.
> "Smart Local Control" home devices work as expected until the electronics fail
ftfy.
> "Smart Local Control" home devices work as expected until the electronics fail
Recently one of my Zigbee-controlled thermostats started pumping cold air constantly. To fix it, all I had to do was open and examine the board; one of the varistors got some battery acid on it when I had an alkaline battery burst in the unit. Because it was a no-name with an actual PCB, I was able to solder a new varistor in place, and it works good as new.
So I would say that "Smart Local Control" isn't the problem, but rather the ability to repair the thing. Also, the thermostat was $45 when I purchased it 5 years ago, so it was a good investment IMO. I think that's why everyone is upset about the Nest gen 1 and 2 sunsetting; there should be no reason that these devices should be breaking now (no failing electronics) but they die anyway because the company is too cheap to keep an extra endpoint running.
This assumes two things:
1. That you can buy a smart local control device.
2. That the electronics were designed with appropriate thermal management so they don't fry themselves quickly. Smart bulbs are the most notorious offenders here, but the problem is widespread.
Well said.
Smarthome tech like this is just trying to make a quick buck at the expense of a lifelong relationship with a customer.
Google have the gaul to "offer" their newer devices at a discount - yes I want to pay you again for something I've already paid for...trusting that you don't this again in 10 years. I have 3 of these devices.
Fuck you Google.
Gotta love proprietary software.
Not your code, not your property.
Example #17,859 of Stallman being right yet again.
"an email from Google stating that they are no longer it's going to support the Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats. While they will continue to operate locally, it appears that they will no longer work with the Nest app or Home app controls."
at least they dont seem to be planning a mass bricking.
Does operate locally retain any smart features or does it just essentially become a dumb thermostat?
From what I understand it just means the app will no longer work for that thermostat. All the other features that you access from the device itself should still work. At least that's how it was presented to me on the Nest app.
Can you access smart features on the device itself? Like program in schedules or whatever? Or does the device itself more or less just let you set a target temperature without the app
Yes those still work. App integration won’t but on device features should be fine.
I had one of the second-gen units, it was programmable locally, and you could locally enable the learning mode (which was not good)
"That alarm cannot be silenced here"
That's what my Nest was saying as it flew out the 3rd floor window.
Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?
>Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?
Serious answer: I do not expect any specific lifetime at all (though legal return period is an obvious floor), but at a bare minimum I do expect (and think should absolutely be mandated by law) that power be intimately tied to responsibility. Ie., it's fine if a hardware vendor decides to retire their cloud services (or OS updates or the like) in 1 year or 10 years or 20 or 30, but IF they cease to support it, THEN they must also remove any technical obstacles to hardware owners pointing it at another service of any kind. So any signing keys required, code, docs/APIs etc. Decide that a given product no longer makes commercial sense for you to produce or support? Sure, fine, it happens. The problem is then ensuring the hardware/software dies with that.
The basic issue is that these places generally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the financial power of a monopoly tie-in and feudal rent extraction, but no responsibilities to go with it and the ability to force customers onto new stuff (or nothing). That should be illegal. Honestly, I think any tie-in should be illegal, fully accessible local APIs should be required and any 1st party subscription should earn its place on its merits.
But at a minimum, no one should be able to have it both ways. If they want power over their customers, they should have responsibility proportional to that. And conversely if they go full open source community friendly hackable from day 1 (and are fully upfront about that), I'm fine saying they have very minimal long term responsibility. There can and should be room for many different approaches to the market, but not extractive lock-in.
When it's a device intended to be installed permanently in a house that could last 100 years, controlling a device that could last 20-30 years, and the company still exists (and is worth trillions to boot), I think 30 years of support would be a completely reasonable expectation.
I don’t know how these were advertised when originally sold, but I think products like these ought to clearly display a minimum sever lifetime. Something like “Nest connected thermostat, with 10 years of guaranteed cloud connectivity” displayed relatively prominently on the packaging. Otherwise, if the vendor can arbitrarily remotely yank access to a key feature, then the consumer is being sold a false bill of goods.
Products are not services. If you buy a product that needs services to work, and at the time of purchase you are clearly informed that those services are subject to change at any time, you are sufficiently aware of the fact that product functionality may change at any time.
You’re still in the return window when you are presented with the service ToS.
We’re retiring something like this at work. The devices were manufactured between 2009-2017. They will continue to operate in non-smart mode until some other part of the device breaks. We’ve notified customers and no one seems particularly upset. To a large degree it seems like the fleet’s obsolete and we could’ve pulled the plug a couple years ago. There’s probably not a good answer in a general sense. It really depends on a host of things.
> no one seems particularly upset
I wonder if that's because the ones that would be upset never bought them in the first place.
As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item. Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the tech space ever. You make it make sense.
As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item. Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the IT space ever. You make it make sense.
liftime of the building it is installed in. if I choose to replace it that is fine but there are still buildings in use 1000 years later, you need to escrow enough to support servers that long just in case.
Yes. Unless Google is going out of business?
I highly recommend Ecobee if you want an alternative to Google Nest.
Does Ecobee require an app and account to be activated, or is it something that HomeKit just detects on the LAN?
I know they used to be Home Assistant capable but required an API key which they will no longer give out. Seems like no fully local control to me. I believe my app stops working when the Internet goes out but it's been a bit.
Oh really? Weird. I did need to do some developer API key thing to get mine in HA, and it's awesome. All sensors and controls work great[1].
Since it's Homekit compatible though, you can go that route. HA easily discovers anything HK compatible as soon as you connect it to your network. So you connect Ecobee to HA with the HomeKit protocol in lieu of connecting it with Apple's stuff.
[1] ...and anything's better than the asinine on-device UI that Ecobee "updated" to a couple years ago (ask yourself: what would a foolish inexperienced "uX dEsIgNeR" do to ruin a plain old thermostat UI? It's that.)
My ecobee has been working a for year with no internet.
Of course the app stops working, but that’s expected from a WiFi product.
I've had both and am much happier with Ecobee.
same here. had 2 nests and 2 ecobees. the only ecobee quirk i find after 9 years of ecobees is that the weather calculation is way off if you live near microclimates. i'm not sure if they use your postal zipcode, or use a map from IP address to more accurate weather, but it's normally showing weather from 10 miles away.
My wife can ask google home for the weather forecast and it is correct. I ( the account holder ) can ask it when right beside her and it will provide weather prediction for a location 30km away.
I was really disappointed with the lack of analytics / historical data.
Thankfully the open source beetstat makes ecobee a lot more useful, with full history and graphs for heat/cool runtime, aux heat, indoor/outdoor humdity, etc
Did anybody not see this coming the day Google fucked over all their Revolv customers in order to force them to buy into the Nest ecosystem?
[dupe]
Some earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45033555
And when it was announced in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43802574
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We try to avoid predictability on HN, which means we don't always need there to be someone making this comment every time Google sunsets a product. Yes, Google has shut down a lot of products. They've also launched a lot of products. It doesn't need a comment like this each time. Comments are always fine if they're thoughtful and substantive, but this kind of comment isn't one of those.
When I think of Google, killing products is one of the first things that come to mind.
I am surprised they weren’t already killed. Switched to Ecobee after the acquisition. I gave my friend my Nest. A year later there was a software problem, Google was like, it’s old, buy a new one. Glad I ditched it.
Didn't those come out in 2012? That's better than most appliances.
Which says something about how bad modern appliances are.
Only if you look at appliance official support windows. In terms of energy consumption, efficiency, noise, storage area, weight, and regular maintenance modern appliances are pretty amazing.
my car is from 1999 and I can still keep it working. I replaced a perfectly working furnace from 1973 a couple years ago (nearly double the efficiency). I still use my 1939 tractor and can get parts for it. I have plenty of other appliances older than that - many modern ones don't work as well
Most thermostats last for decades and decades. It is simple equipment.
Kind of an apples and oranges comparison though. Analog and simple digital thermostats are very simple while something like the nest is running 32-bit OS. Complexity increases cost.
>Complexity increases cost
Not really. The BOM of a smart thermostat is nearly equal to a dumb one right now. What adds cost is reliability. Hardware reliability costs engineering time and expensive component choices. Software reliability requires engineering resources and a mindset beyond optimizing quarterly returns.
There is no legitimate reason a fancy thermostat should be e-waste after ten years.
Worse than most thermostats that aren't made by Google though.