This HN discussion shows a huge range of valid opinions.
On one end: A company can't spend forever supporting a product. It's economical madness.
On the other end: We paid for it, we should be able to use it until it wears out. The company locked everyone else out, so they did this to themselves.
I think we reached the limits of current ownership theory. We have things that are partly a buyable object and partly service, and current law doesn't deal well with that.
Some possible changes I'd like to see:
1) The terms should become explicit. If continues company support is needed, the company should make that clear and specify a minimal end date.
2) Consumer rights should be enforced for services. No kicking consumers out whenever a company feels like it.
3) When a company abandons a product(or ceases existing), the locks on it should be removed so someone else can support it.
4) Things should be safe by default. A hackable internet connected product has a manufacturing defect and should be fixed or recalled for the (published) product lifetime.
rightbyte 14 days ago [-]
> On one end: A company can't spend forever supporting a product. It's economical madness.
An electronic thermostat would probably last about 30 years maybe. That is hardly forever.
vouaobrasil 14 days ago [-]
I think your ideas are good, and not because of smart thermostats, but because of smartphones. The hardware on older ones still work, so they should have a way of still being functional. There should be enough information released on them so that the latest versions of Android can still be supported.
petermcneeley 14 days ago [-]
>A company can't spend forever supporting a product. It's economical madness.
Do you know what a trust is? or an annuity? Yes you can with a fixed amount of money provide the funds to support a product forever.
Dowwie 14 days ago [-]
I just went through the exercise of addressing item 4 for an IOT product. The odds that an organization enables security features is influenced by a multitude of factors. More to come on this.
xyst 14 days ago [-]
Should be illegal. Instead of offering coupon codes, should be open sourced or unlocked. No reason to send this to the local landfill if it’s primary job is still functional.
pcdoodle 14 days ago [-]
A coupon code is very generous after 16 years. Also it still works as a dumb thermostat.
ryandrake 14 days ago [-]
“Ceasing support” should not mean the product fundamentally changes. If I buy a smart thermostat, I expect it to be and remain a smart thermostat. It should work exactly as the day it was purchased, forever. A bait and switch is still a bait and switch even if the switch happens 16 years later.
This should absolutely 100% be illegal.
I don’t want to hear boo hoo whiny excuses about how hard it is to keep a server running. If you as a company can’t do it, you have no business selling a connected device that depends on a server.
pyuser583 14 days ago [-]
A 16 year lifespan is pretty good for “smart” electronics.
What do you think an IOT devices guaranteed lifespan should be?
Nullabillity 14 days ago [-]
Physical lifetime of the product would be a start.
Don't like it? Don't build cloud-bound landfill fodder.
rightbyte 14 days ago [-]
16 years are a pitty. My termostats have been operating for 39 years. I have changed one that got scewed off by a bed move.
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
These 1980s mechanical thermostats in your apples-to-oranges comparison, do they support remote connectivity?
Over dial-up?
To the steam-powered cloud?
Do you realistically expect such a thing to be supported 40 years later at no cost?
Phone companies are literally ripping out landlines or abandoning them in place.
The closest thing I can think of that maintains ancient technology are alarm systems and you pay hefty monthly fees to help pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the infra. It also helps that the manufacturers of the hardware are still around and keeping the designs supported.
rightbyte 13 days ago [-]
I know consumer IoT using SaaS is a rug pull fraud, but yes, I except any such device to keep its functionality for 40 years at no extra cost.
what-the-grump 13 days ago [-]
I have a PC that is that old, still works fine. I have clients with production systems older than that. I have buildings with elevator controls that are from the 50s.
We all do tech here right? It’s a simple infra stack to store settings for a device and report on them once in a while.
No one is sitting at home and doomscrolling their ecobee thermostat for temperature updates.
I expect the cloud infra needed to support the thermostat to be so cheap at this point that it’s completely irrelevant. I expect that ecobee spend more money on coffee than the infra needed. Fact is I bet that a free aws account can service a significant portion of the demand.
I can connect up to 100 wyze cams to my account and store footage and remotely access them for the huge sum of 7$/mo.
You are telling me thermostat configs are harder to handle? Bullshit.
wannacboatmovie 12 days ago [-]
What utter nonsense. First example would be these units probably use some ancient depreciated version of TLS or cipher suite that cannot be upgraded due to hardware limitations, forcing the back end to support legacy out of date software. Then the headline would be "ecobee doesn't care about security" with the Hacker News armchair security crowd all over them, claiming without specifics they could do a better job. Please.
Zenzero 14 days ago [-]
I would be sympathetic to you if it were 2 years. Expecting "forever" is just entitlement. Smart thermostat features require ongoing support. You aren't entitled to the labor of other people forever just because you bought a piece of plastic. Have some understanding for the people who dedicated their time and work to making it happen.
throwaway11460 14 days ago [-]
There is no reason it can't work over local network without any cloud. They just decided not to do that.
ClumsyPilot 14 days ago [-]
> Smart thermostat features require ongoing support. You aren't entitled to the labor
That’s a complete fabrication!
I have a laptop from 1999 and it still runs, and it’s smarter than any thermostat. You / they chose to build it in such a way that it requires ongoing labour. That’s on them. They could build it using open standards and connect it to home assistant, and then it would not require labour.
Simply put, they want to have complete control and no responsibility - and they feel entitled to my money.
raizer88 14 days ago [-]
I expect it to last forever, unless it's written otherwise in the package. Do you expect your oven to stop working after 5 years if nothing is broken inside?
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
Your comment is so utterly preposterous I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.
It reads like the complaint box of a volunteer open source developer who isn't providing you free bug fixes and features fast enough.
They provided a free service for 16 years and I'm sure it was in the ToS that they are under no obligation to do so.
And for people wondering why we need ToS and license agreements for free stuff and lawyers to write them, this is why.
This is why we can't have nice things.
ryandrake 14 days ago [-]
A device manufacturer should not be able to simply decide to remove functionality from a device I bought and paid for. Would you accept it if your stove’s manufacturer decided to “cease support” and removed a few heating elements from the stove? Would you accept it if your car’s manufacturer decided to “cease support” for sedans and removed the back seats from your car? Consumers would not roll over and accept this behavior, and I’d hope in those cases the manufacturers would be liable for something.
Somehow, for connected devices we excuse this same thing “because internet”. I’m hoping this is just a case of the law moving slowly and not catching up.
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
Your examples are irrelevant because they did not remove any functionality from the device which you paid for.
The functionality is being removed from the app, which you never paid for.
The device will continue functioning as a local thermostat for many years.
ClumsyPilot 14 days ago [-]
I am just waiting untill do the same to you, like remove ‘unlock your car’ function from the app.
And when you complain that your £50,000 vehicle became useless, they will tell you ‘we removed it from the app, and you never paid for it’
acdha 14 days ago [-]
> It reads like the complaint box of a volunteer open source developer who isn't providing you free bug fixes and features fast enough.
The key difference here is that it’s not a volunteer but a large company which sold a product in a category where service lifetimes are measured in decades - tons of people have thermostats which are pushing half a century old and nobody finds that unusual. I think that changes the expectation in a way which really should require full disclosure up front: service lifetimes and the impact of support ending should be on the front of the box, disclosed before money changes hands.
Larrikin 14 days ago [-]
It's not a free service they ran out of the goodness of their heart. It's a service the consumer paid for when they bought the thermostat.
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
If they priced the thermostat at $10,000 each with guaranteed long term support, you would have a case.
A $150 device doesn't pay hosting in perpetuity.
Ecobee is a great company that made a better mousetrap with a free app when competitors were still charging monthly fees.
Did everyone here throw a shitfit when 2G cellular was retired? The original iPhone is a doorstop. Should the mobile phone companies be forced to still support your Motorola DynaTac from 1987?
swatcoder 14 days ago [-]
These companies marketed to a public not yet experienced with cloud-dependent services and the inevitably finite lifetime they carry, and frankly (I can say from experience) many of the product designers and engineers weren't really thinking ahead about that stuff either.
Lots of stuff is engineered as if it will be usable indefinitely (or until it physically wears out), even though it has technical dependencies or financial costs that make that infeasible, and almost almost all that stuff is sold to the public under the pretense that it's just a better version of the same old thing. Very few products, especially among consumer good, openly communicate a window of support or availability and many don't even predict a specific one internally.
You're probably right that there'd probably no teeth to a suit, but that's more because the practice of denying that cloud-backed products are ephemeral is just that pervasive. It's an effective excuse, but also a crappy one.
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
It's important to note that these devices are not self-destructing nor are they cloud-dependent and will still perform their primary function as a locally controlled touchscreen thermostat. It is the remote control via app features that are being disabled.
It is similar to how the original iPhone and iPad are basically unusable with no connectivity in today's world (think: these legacy thermostats may not support modern security protocols due to lack of power to perform the cryptographic functions, or software support in the > 16 year old microcontroller. Let's assume hardware was designed with chips in production a few years before the release so we're talking 2005-era hardware. This is pre-iPhone, George Bush was still president and you had a flip phone in your pocket. Should they never upgrade their backend security so they can support these things in perpetuity?) Sadly, I suspect if this was an Apple(r)(tm) Thermostat the HN crowd would be banding together in their defense.
ryandrake 14 days ago [-]
> It is similar to how the original iPhone and iPad are basically unusable with no connectivity in today's world
This should be unacceptable as well.
latentcall 14 days ago [-]
How much can hosting for this model realistically cost? Ecobee can afford to support it they just don’t want to. I’ll commend them for supporting it for 16 years however.
ravenstine 14 days ago [-]
It's an entitled attitude, and even if those with said attitude had a valid point, it wouldn't be a particularly realistic or mature one. Any time you rely on a third party for anything, you are risking them no longer providing a service for you. In the case of a free service, you get exactly what you pay for. By the current standard, 16 years and a discount is pretty good for something that was a free offering.
ryandrake 14 days ago [-]
You're making the same mistake as others in this thread by artificially separating the "smart" service from the product. When customers buy a physical product, they're buying the whole package, and they are making the reasonable assumption that it will continue to work as-is as long as they own it.
When you buy a smart thinggy attached to the Internet, the manufacturer is not graciously providing a separate free service, outside of the "real" product. It's selling the smartness as part of the whole product. They shouldn't get to later say, "Ha ha only kidding, we're now cutting features A, B, and C out of your product because we imagine them as a separate 'service'." That's bullshit.
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
You keep trying to redefine reality to align with your vision of perpetual free support for your $150 piece of plastic. You paid for the hardware, which still functions as a thermostat. You never paid for the app, which was free.
I suggest reading through the EULA next time you click through because it very likely says they are under no obligation to provide support forever and can discontinue it at any time, and if you don't like it you can take it back to the store. <AGREE>
Apple rendered my AppleTV gen 1 completely useless without warning when they decided to end support for it after much less than 16 years (in typical Apple fashion, with no announcement or plan, it just stopped working one day). No coupon, no apology, just a "fuck you, buy a new one" and I paid a heck of a lot more than $150 at the time. They've even done worse: removing music from the iTunes Store THAT I PAID FOR such that it isn't available from iCloud for download anymore, despite the whole point of iCloud being that your stuff is there forever.
chabes 14 days ago [-]
Both companies are guilty of these practices. No need to defend Ecobee while using Apple as an example of why it is ok (even though it felt like “fuck you”).
Regardless of license agreements (Have you actually read yours?), it’s still a shitty practice, and people are rightly upset.
What upset you about the Apple tactics is somehow ok for other companies…how does that make sense?
wannacboatmovie 14 days ago [-]
The Apple situation was far more egregious. There was no announcement or planned end of support (no surprise coming from Apple).
One day I flipped on the TV and it no longer worked. From what I could piece together, they made a breaking change to their API and did no testing on the legacy product. Instead of doing the right thing and fixing the bug, they just said "fuck them, they get no updates". No coupon, no nothing, just a brick in my living room and forced to upgrade if I expected to stream content. And Apple, above nearly any other company, had the money and resources to throw at fixing their mistake. But they chose not to.
The other distinction is the ecobee's primary purpose as a functioning thermostat isn't affected.
jsifiejqkdjc 14 days ago [-]
or perhaps it’s because engineers can’t design offline-first systems, and the politicians don’t understand that it’s possible and therefore can become part of consumer regulations, creating the market for devices that would be beneficial for all consumers
ravenstine 14 days ago [-]
Are you suggesting that Ecobee devices don't work offline? I've never connected mine to the internet and it's worked swimmingly for the last 6 years.
k4rli 14 days ago [-]
"ok we disabled the product that you purchased and which still works, but here's a 30% coupon to buy a new one"
Gladly buying a new one...
pbronez 14 days ago [-]
So what’s the best option for a smart thermostat that works entirely locally with home assistant?
spdustin 14 days ago [-]
An ESP32/ESP8266 with ESPHome's built-in Thermostat controller [0] and a relay (or solid state switch) board with optoisolation.
There are a few other options that are pre-made, like this [1], or that offer guidelines for DIYing it [2]
The relay doesn't really need to be opto-isolated. It can be, and optos are cheap enough that many common pre-assembled relay boards include them, but it's not really necessary.
If a person has enough stuff in front of them to make a relay reliably click on and off, then they also have enough stuff in front of them to make a conventional forced air furnace turn on and off just as a thermostat would.
spdustin 14 days ago [-]
I wouldn’t want the load current flowing through anything it shouldn’t. Maybe I’m too cautious, but it’s a binary rule that I’ve always followed when the load current is enough to cause harm to anything, or release the magic smoke inside the controller.
ssl-3 12 days ago [-]
I wouldn't want that, either.
But a relay is already an isolator: There's no path between the switched contacts and the coil of the solenoid that switches those contacts. The coil doesn't know or care how much current or voltage the contacts are switching: It's just a coil that moves a little bit of metal using electromagnetism.
And, sure: It takes more power to drive a relay's coil than it does to drive an LED inside of an optocoupler, but at some point that coil still needs to be driven by something that can accomplish that small amount of work.
Adding an optocoupler just seems like adding extra parts to a circuit that would be simpler without.
KISS?
wwmiller3 14 days ago [-]
To your point, I have had the high voltage side of a high-efficiency furnace (e.g., inducer fan) fail and take out the entire string of low voltage components (thermostat, humidifier controls) connected to the furnace through an unfortunate coupling on the primary control board.
FireBeyond 14 days ago [-]
Ironically the Ecobee works for most of this. I had to set it up online but now it’s firewalled off and communicates locally with HomeKit. Not exactly what you seek I understand but the Ecobee does better locally than my Nest did.
aitchnyu 14 days ago [-]
How's it firewalled off and can the technique be used for other types of devices?
piperswe 14 days ago [-]
A Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat will do nicely. No internet connection at all, just a connection to a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle on your Home Assistant server
blessedwhiskers 13 days ago [-]
I had a Honeywell smart thermostat that worked entirely locally with Apple's HomeKit. I haven't used Home Assistant but a cursory Google search implies this would work. My recollection is it was a Honeywell T5. Notably it did sometimes fall off the WiFi for brief periods of time, so I couldn't give the product itself a ringing endorsement.
I usually specifically look for smart devices like this because I dislike the idea of them phoning home for "analytics" or "to enhance my marketing experience" and just firewall them off.
I'm not sure if it's explicitly required, but I've yet to encounter a HomeKit device that didn't work when prohibited from talking to anything outside the LAN.
Rendered at 06:28:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
On one end: A company can't spend forever supporting a product. It's economical madness.
On the other end: We paid for it, we should be able to use it until it wears out. The company locked everyone else out, so they did this to themselves.
I think we reached the limits of current ownership theory. We have things that are partly a buyable object and partly service, and current law doesn't deal well with that.
Some possible changes I'd like to see:
1) The terms should become explicit. If continues company support is needed, the company should make that clear and specify a minimal end date.
2) Consumer rights should be enforced for services. No kicking consumers out whenever a company feels like it.
3) When a company abandons a product(or ceases existing), the locks on it should be removed so someone else can support it.
4) Things should be safe by default. A hackable internet connected product has a manufacturing defect and should be fixed or recalled for the (published) product lifetime.
An electronic thermostat would probably last about 30 years maybe. That is hardly forever.
Do you know what a trust is? or an annuity? Yes you can with a fixed amount of money provide the funds to support a product forever.
This should absolutely 100% be illegal.
I don’t want to hear boo hoo whiny excuses about how hard it is to keep a server running. If you as a company can’t do it, you have no business selling a connected device that depends on a server.
What do you think an IOT devices guaranteed lifespan should be?
Don't like it? Don't build cloud-bound landfill fodder.
Over dial-up?
To the steam-powered cloud?
Do you realistically expect such a thing to be supported 40 years later at no cost?
Phone companies are literally ripping out landlines or abandoning them in place.
The closest thing I can think of that maintains ancient technology are alarm systems and you pay hefty monthly fees to help pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the infra. It also helps that the manufacturers of the hardware are still around and keeping the designs supported.
We all do tech here right? It’s a simple infra stack to store settings for a device and report on them once in a while.
No one is sitting at home and doomscrolling their ecobee thermostat for temperature updates.
I expect the cloud infra needed to support the thermostat to be so cheap at this point that it’s completely irrelevant. I expect that ecobee spend more money on coffee than the infra needed. Fact is I bet that a free aws account can service a significant portion of the demand.
I can connect up to 100 wyze cams to my account and store footage and remotely access them for the huge sum of 7$/mo.
You are telling me thermostat configs are harder to handle? Bullshit.
That’s a complete fabrication!
I have a laptop from 1999 and it still runs, and it’s smarter than any thermostat. You / they chose to build it in such a way that it requires ongoing labour. That’s on them. They could build it using open standards and connect it to home assistant, and then it would not require labour.
Simply put, they want to have complete control and no responsibility - and they feel entitled to my money.
It reads like the complaint box of a volunteer open source developer who isn't providing you free bug fixes and features fast enough.
They provided a free service for 16 years and I'm sure it was in the ToS that they are under no obligation to do so.
And for people wondering why we need ToS and license agreements for free stuff and lawyers to write them, this is why.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Somehow, for connected devices we excuse this same thing “because internet”. I’m hoping this is just a case of the law moving slowly and not catching up.
The functionality is being removed from the app, which you never paid for.
The device will continue functioning as a local thermostat for many years.
And when you complain that your £50,000 vehicle became useless, they will tell you ‘we removed it from the app, and you never paid for it’
The key difference here is that it’s not a volunteer but a large company which sold a product in a category where service lifetimes are measured in decades - tons of people have thermostats which are pushing half a century old and nobody finds that unusual. I think that changes the expectation in a way which really should require full disclosure up front: service lifetimes and the impact of support ending should be on the front of the box, disclosed before money changes hands.
A $150 device doesn't pay hosting in perpetuity.
Ecobee is a great company that made a better mousetrap with a free app when competitors were still charging monthly fees.
Did everyone here throw a shitfit when 2G cellular was retired? The original iPhone is a doorstop. Should the mobile phone companies be forced to still support your Motorola DynaTac from 1987?
Lots of stuff is engineered as if it will be usable indefinitely (or until it physically wears out), even though it has technical dependencies or financial costs that make that infeasible, and almost almost all that stuff is sold to the public under the pretense that it's just a better version of the same old thing. Very few products, especially among consumer good, openly communicate a window of support or availability and many don't even predict a specific one internally.
You're probably right that there'd probably no teeth to a suit, but that's more because the practice of denying that cloud-backed products are ephemeral is just that pervasive. It's an effective excuse, but also a crappy one.
It is similar to how the original iPhone and iPad are basically unusable with no connectivity in today's world (think: these legacy thermostats may not support modern security protocols due to lack of power to perform the cryptographic functions, or software support in the > 16 year old microcontroller. Let's assume hardware was designed with chips in production a few years before the release so we're talking 2005-era hardware. This is pre-iPhone, George Bush was still president and you had a flip phone in your pocket. Should they never upgrade their backend security so they can support these things in perpetuity?) Sadly, I suspect if this was an Apple(r)(tm) Thermostat the HN crowd would be banding together in their defense.
This should be unacceptable as well.
When you buy a smart thinggy attached to the Internet, the manufacturer is not graciously providing a separate free service, outside of the "real" product. It's selling the smartness as part of the whole product. They shouldn't get to later say, "Ha ha only kidding, we're now cutting features A, B, and C out of your product because we imagine them as a separate 'service'." That's bullshit.
I suggest reading through the EULA next time you click through because it very likely says they are under no obligation to provide support forever and can discontinue it at any time, and if you don't like it you can take it back to the store. <AGREE>
Apple rendered my AppleTV gen 1 completely useless without warning when they decided to end support for it after much less than 16 years (in typical Apple fashion, with no announcement or plan, it just stopped working one day). No coupon, no apology, just a "fuck you, buy a new one" and I paid a heck of a lot more than $150 at the time. They've even done worse: removing music from the iTunes Store THAT I PAID FOR such that it isn't available from iCloud for download anymore, despite the whole point of iCloud being that your stuff is there forever.
Regardless of license agreements (Have you actually read yours?), it’s still a shitty practice, and people are rightly upset.
What upset you about the Apple tactics is somehow ok for other companies…how does that make sense?
One day I flipped on the TV and it no longer worked. From what I could piece together, they made a breaking change to their API and did no testing on the legacy product. Instead of doing the right thing and fixing the bug, they just said "fuck them, they get no updates". No coupon, no nothing, just a brick in my living room and forced to upgrade if I expected to stream content. And Apple, above nearly any other company, had the money and resources to throw at fixing their mistake. But they chose not to.
The other distinction is the ecobee's primary purpose as a functioning thermostat isn't affected.
Gladly buying a new one...
There are a few other options that are pre-made, like this [1], or that offer guidelines for DIYing it [2]
[0]: https://esphome.io/components/climate/thermostat.html
[1]: https://joestump.github.io/hass/esp8266-thermostat/
[2]: https://youtu.be/WgDV-PlD3AE?si=74iQeFaVBgZcmTVp
If a person has enough stuff in front of them to make a relay reliably click on and off, then they also have enough stuff in front of them to make a conventional forced air furnace turn on and off just as a thermostat would.
But a relay is already an isolator: There's no path between the switched contacts and the coil of the solenoid that switches those contacts. The coil doesn't know or care how much current or voltage the contacts are switching: It's just a coil that moves a little bit of metal using electromagnetism.
And, sure: It takes more power to drive a relay's coil than it does to drive an LED inside of an optocoupler, but at some point that coil still needs to be driven by something that can accomplish that small amount of work.
Adding an optocoupler just seems like adding extra parts to a circuit that would be simpler without.
KISS?
I usually specifically look for smart devices like this because I dislike the idea of them phoning home for "analytics" or "to enhance my marketing experience" and just firewall them off.
I'm not sure if it's explicitly required, but I've yet to encounter a HomeKit device that didn't work when prohibited from talking to anything outside the LAN.