I think you are getting it wrong, remote switching a light with your smartphone is almost a byproduct of home automation. Nice things you can have: turning on/off external lights at certain conditions; dim bathroom lights at night so if you go there in darkness you won't be blinded; turning off lights automatucally when you have kids that keep forgetting about it (I tell them each time anyway like in the old times just to teach them); blinders that go down at sunset, but only when it's cold enough outside etc etc. You might think you can live without this, you absolutely can, just like you can live without many other things.

You are conflating automation with remote control.

Replacing a lightswitch with an app that requires human interaction is indeed ridiculous.

Replacing a lightswitch with a motion sensor has been a staple feature of commercial buildings for decades.

Similar for heating control, occupancy detection, adaptive lighting, energy management, etc. Replacing a physical entity without adding any value to it is pointless, hence the 'automation' part of the phrase

It is actually the same number of trips on my end at least. Without phone control for my lights, I turn off the lights on the way to the couch, get comfortable in the dark (can't even see all my blankets), then look for the remote in the dark, and then start up a movie. With the phone control for my lights I go to the couch, do all that stuff in the light, and then dim the lights afterwards. The only difference is that I have to paw around for the remote longer in the first scenario.

While there is some resource waste because I'm not going to rip the old lightswitches and copper wires out of my apartment walls and, I dunno, recycle them or something, this doesn't seem to be a fundamental issue. The automated stuff is mostly wireless, so I guess we could save a bit of copper if we were to install it in lieu of switches. So really the issue is that the previous designer didn't correctly separate out UI from underlying functionality, that's their waste not mine!

As others have said, there many things which are much more practical to implement with "smarts".

In my case, I love my Hue (and similar) lights. It's not just a question of not getting off my ass to turn them on and off. It's the fact they can be dimmed, that at night if I get up I always press the same button, but the light won't blind me. I can also easily change the colors when I'm watching a movie, etc.

Yeah, I could probably buy separate dumb lights for each purpose, and turn them on or off according to the need of the moment. But I live in a small, rented apartment, so having random wires and tons of lamps all over the place would be much more painful than fiddling with an app (which actually works quite well).

However, I agree that the smarts should be able to be easily bypassed in case they don't work. With Hue, the lights can be configured to turn on automatically when powered on for example, so I can always turn on the light from my dumb wall switch if the controller is dead.

One thing that I always ask myself when starting down a thought process like this one is “But does it have accessibility benefits?” In this case, being able to turn on lights or raise blinds remotely has a clear and obvious benefit to people with motor difficulties.

I'm basically in agreement with you; while I've seen some good use cases for HA, much of it is indeed falling into some other camp (even the person who needed it to have a single place to adjust the 18 lamps in their basement; it is a bit of a luxury to have 18 separate lights in a room).

However, are you sure that resources are scarce? It seems to me we are rather too good at extracting them and turning them into commodities.

One big problem is usability. If you want something to turn on, the easiest way would be to have to ability to touch said thing and turn it on. Also security, planned obsolescence and so on.

A master switch in the front door, turn off everything, before leaving the house is the only automation I love and miss when I don't have it.

I agree, there is some convenience when it works but when it doesn’t it’s so infuriating that it undoes all the previous convenience.

What are you using instead to make such automations?

This might not help much, but I've not seen _any_ of the issues you mention above and I have a ton of cameras, sockets, HomePods and lights in my Home app.

Just curious: What is the advantage of this setup over a timer switch socket for the Espresso machine?

As much as I love Apple products, Siri is my least favorite.

I just can't fathom why they can't get Siri right after all these years. She will just respond to something completely irrelevant once in a while, presumably because it sounded like a command issued to her.

The toddler comparison is spot on. Occasionally it's like she's busy doing something else (clearly MUCH more important,.. maybe she's mining bitcoin in the cloud?), instead of listening to my requests.

That being said, I still use Siri for things when I have my hands full. She can be a lifesaver.

That is just FUD. 99% of HomeKit automation happens on the LAN (in contrast to Alexa’s “let me pop open ports on your router and call external APIs for everything” approach), and iCloud is only used for setting up keys and remote access when outside the home.

Have you looked at home assistant? It can control most things locally without any cloud (including HomeKit accessories)

Wired connections to Apple TVs and numerous wired access points make a world of difference. And good quality routers/access points.

I would not even bother with Homekit (or any other system) without a higher end wired home networking setup.

I'm not sure Wifi has anything to do with it but then I have no idea how this stuff works. I have one Meross Smart Plug Mini. It's the only thing that shows up on my router. I have 11 Nanoleaf essentials A19 Bulb (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPE62ZM/A/nanoleaf-essent...). None of those show up on Wifi so no idea how they work (Bluetooth, Wifi Broadcast)

6 of them are less than 10 feet from the WiFi AP in the same room, and also less than 10ft from an AppleTV (3 are 5ft from it). The other 5 of them are in the next room (so less than 20ft from the AP). in that room I have no problem streaming 5-10 streams of simultaneous video over Wifi to my laptop

AppleTV is on wired network.

All of the lights are slow to respond. The ones on the same room as the AP and the ones away. It doesn't matter. The Meross plug, which is on Wifi, is almost always instant to respond, but, in the 6 months I've owned it it's entirely failed to respond at all 3 times (so once ever 2 months) at which point I go manually unplug it. Plugging it in immediately doesn't fix the issue but plugging it in a few days later seem to reset it.

The whole thing is super frustrating and feels not ready for prime time. I feel duped.

> My number one recommendation is to make sure your AppleTV home hub is wired.

Tragically, if you have the original ATV4 (September 2017), it's only got a 100Mb Ethernet port, which is embarassing for something released in 2017.

Even more tragically, when I use Plex, I often find it's hitting some weird bug in the ATV4 where it will be unable to stream 10Mbps videos when wired, but has absolutely no problem streaming those same videos when on wifi, despite being less than 20 feet of copper cabling between the apple tv, network switch, and the Plex server.

Of course, having an AC1700 wifi AP means that wifi is massively faster than wired for the ATV4, but shouldn't matter when the video peak bitrate is 10% of the max wired speed, but watching the monitoring of the server, the client is just requesting data at too low a rate.

Never bothered to actually pcap it to identify, but I'm willing to bet that some weird condition was triggering on the ATV4 resulting in too low a TCP window size being used.

Either way, "wired is always better" is generally true, unless you have an Apple TV 4th Generation. Then it's not always true.

..and even wired, my Hue lights are still slow to respond through Home.app, but immediate to respond to the physical zigbee button.

>In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.

FWIW: I consider this to also be an Apple problem. Look, I have no idea how the Airport Express stacked up to the competition really, maybe it was junk, but it generally met my needs and was better than any of the other options I'd used in the past in terms of not having to fiddle with it much. Now imagine you are a consumer with no technical knowledge - do you buy a device or do you go along with whatever your ISP offers you? If Apple made a wifi device of some kind again, of course I'd buy it because I'm already in their ecosystem.