A Smart Home Doesn't Solve A Dumb You

Do you take pleasure from dodging failed tech crazes, yet fear being labeled a luddite? Did you relish the decline of LaserDiscs, but deride DVDs for a little too long? Are you skeptical of this whole “internet of things” and “smarthome” craze but anxious about waking up and finding yourself painfully out of the loop?

Well then listen up because this might be the perfect $30 test balloon you need to decide whether your home needs to be smart.

First of all: What is Hue and why do hue care? Err … why do you care. It’s Philips’s smart lightbulb system that connects wirelessly and lets you control the lights using your mind (via a connected device).

Second of all: Why is this so cheap? Can you still pooh-pooh smarthome systems as being over-priced methods of turning on the lights? Well, this is the not the current-gen system, so you can get this whole package for well under the price of just two current-gen bulbs thanks to our society’s fear/paranoia of being “outdated,” which brings us to …

Threest of all: What does this system not feature that the newest ones do? For a full explanation, check out this article. TL;DR: The newer versions have Siri and HomeKit support and this does not, but does have Alexa support. That means, of course, that if you’re an Android or Alexa user you’re just getting a terrific deal on these without sacrificing features, and if you’re an Apple user you can still use the Hue app.

So, OK, let’s assume you’re going to dip your 30 bucks in the smarthome waters – what should you expect? In a word: Niceness. As in, “Oh, that’s nice.” As with most Epcot-Center-like retrofuturism, technology is more likely to chip away at the little everyday anxieties rather than revolutionize the way we live. Dishwashers are nice but they don’t eliminate the issue of dishes altogether. Uber is nice but you still have to sit in traffic.

Likewise, having your lights already on when you stumble into the kitchen to make coffee will be nice, but you’ll still have to remember to put the grounds in after the filter. Your smart home can only make up for so much incompetence.