The convenience is being able to sit your fat ass on the couch and yell vaguely in the direction of a smart assistant to turn off the lights without having to get off the couch.

The idea that a smart refrigerator could tell you when you’re about out of milk or coming up on the expiration date instead of having to open your fridge and take a look is cool but the privacy and other implications outweigh the benefits.

It’s a mild convenience that supposedly frees up extra time to do something else. The sad part is that something else is usually staying glued to your phone, social media, or TV.

Why anyone would want a corporate government surveillance wire tap that’s connected to the Internet and constantly listening for voice command is beyond me.

My friend used an Alexa and smart plugs to rewire all the lights in his house because it was cheaper to get the Wi-Fi connected lights and sockets rather than rewiring the whole house.

In order to keep the thing running, no one was allowed to touch any of the lights switches on the walls because it would break the system. It was fucking hilarious listening to him yell at his Alexa to turn on the lights in the living room and have it turn on the dining room instead.

He even had the screen on the base that would follow you around as you were walking in the house and this creepy screen would constantly be monitoring you while waiting for commands.

If anyone walked in it just looked like he was screaming at the top of his refrigerator about the lights in the house.

Yeah, my favorite is when they figure out what features people are willing to pay for and then paywal everything that makes an app useful.

And after they monetize that fully and realize that the money is not endless, they switch to a subscription model. So that they can have you pay for your depreciating crappy software forever.

But at least you know it kind of works while you’re paying for it. It takes way too much effort to find some other unknown piece of software for the same function, and it is usually performs worse than what you had until the developers figure out how to make the features work again before putting it behind a paywall and subscription model again again.

But along the way, everyone gets to be miserable from the users to the developers and the project managers. Everyone except of course, the shareholders Because they get to make money, no matter how crappy their product, which they don’t use anyway, becomes.

A great recent example of this is Plex. It used to be open source and free, then it got more popular and started developing other features, and I asked people to pay reasonable amount for them.

After it got more popular and easy to use and set up, they started jacking up the prices, removing features and forcing people to buy subscriptions.

Your alternative now is to go back to a less fully featured more difficult to set up but open source alternative and something like Jellyfin. Except that most people won’t know how to set it up, there are way less devices and TVs will support their software, and you can’t get it to work easily for your technologically illiterate family and or friends.

So again, Your choices are stay with a crappy commercialized money-grubbing subscription based product that at least works and is fully featured for now until they decide to stop. Or, get a new, less developed, more difficult to set up, highly technical, and less supported product that’s open source and hope that it doesn’t fall into the same pitfalls as its user base and popularity grows.

Set up a pihole on your network and add a few block lists. If your IoT appliances phone home at least you can block the traffic and monitor what things phone home.

As for buying appliances that are not smart, It takes extra effort and a trade-off in features.

For example, my toothbrush has Bluetooth in it. if I want a non-Bluetooth toothbrush I’d have to get a lower quality model because they simply don’t make one without it.

Most people buy whatever’s on sale, And considering how expensive home appliances are they usually put the expensive featured models on sale since there’s a bigger margin.

So if I wanted to get a basic one with less features, that’s not smart it would actually be more expensive because it will never go on sale.