I was a very early adopter of programmable thermostats (we didn't call them "smart" back then). We installed a Honeywell Chronotherm III in our condo c.1989. We did not live there long, but I was very happy with the functionality of the Chronotherm.

Since then, I have owned 3-4 programmable thermostats. None of them have had as satisfying a UX as that old Chronotherm. Why? The Chronoterm had 1 key function:

Skip Next Period

Very common use case. You are home sick for the day, and don't want the temperature to go down, like it is programmed for when the house is unoccupied during the workday. Or you have houseguests, and don't want to inflict your penny-pinching overnight setting on them.

Change To Last Period

Also very common. The Skip Next Period use cases above apply, except if you aren't on the ball and forget to choose SKIP in advance. Or you get home from work early. Or have insomnia and wake up early.

Bluetooth Needs A "Connect Automatically" opt-out, like wireless networks

I mostly work from home, and spend a lot of time on conference calls. Not infrequently, my wife will drive somewhere after I have started the workday. So guess what happens? Her car steals my Bluetooth connection, to both our dismay.

This is such a basic problem, I can't believe it hasn't been widely-solved at this point. Off the top of my head solution: Bluetooth devices should have a "Connect Automatically" checkbox, the same way that WiFi networks do.

That is the table-stakes solution. The enhancement would be to offer a third choice: Connect Automatically if phone is not currently connected to a different Bluetooth device.

Summary: 

1. Connect Automatically (the way it works now)
2. Connect Automatically if phone is not currently connected.
3. Do Not Connect Automatically.

Universal Dash Phone Holder Slot

I've used a number of different cradles for mounting my smart phone in the car. The CD-slot ones seem far superior--if you have an old enough car that it has a CD slot. Which makes me wonder--why isn't there a a universal phone-mount slot standard? It wouldn't have to be nearly as wide as a CD-slot. For extra credit, it could also provide a charging port or maybe even wireless charging.

I know, if you have Android Auto or Apply CarPlay, you may not need to mount your phone while driving. But not all cars have them, and there are apps that don't support them, and also there are automakers that don't support them. Also, wireless use can be iffy, and sometimes you are in a hurry on a short trip, and not interested in connecting the cable (if you don't have wireless). Or maybe a passenger is connected to the audio.

Luxury of excessive battery life

I am a super-heavy earbud user. I have a pair of SoundCore A40 earbuds that has ridiculously good battery life, both in the buds and the case. So good that I don't have to devote any time to worrying or managing the battery. In 2 years of heavily daily usage, not one time have I run out of charge or had to conserve. That is such an under-rated luxury!

Which makes me wonder--how much bigger would an iPhone have to be (for sake of argument, let's say the mainstream regular size iPhone 16) to double the battery life? I would certainly accept a 1/3 increase in volume for that!

Where Are the Smart Monitors?

 During daytime, I set my monitor to 100% brightness. At night, I dial it down to 70%. Why can't this be automated?

Apple Should Sell A Viewclix Killer

Viewclix is a popular photo-frame device whose canonical use case is to allow family members to share photos with an older relative who is not up on technology. It also has secondary uses of push teleconferencing (you can initiate the teleconference remotely, without a tech-challenged elder having to do anything), and posting reminders to your loved one ("remember, we will pick you up today at 11:00 for lunch"). 

It does work okay, but the usability, for photos in particular, is very clunky. So clunky I found myself putting off updating the photo rotation, which was the main reason for getting the device. I have since confirmed a much better solution for updating the photo frame functionality: simply deploy a spare TV or monitor, equipped with Chromecast, as a remote Google photos sharing device. Just a few, simple steps:

1. Set up a shared album(s).
2. Invite other family members to be contributors or administrators (depending if you want to let other delete, as well as add, photos) to the shared album.
3. Set Ambient Mode on the Chromecast to show the shared album(s).

Voila!

In addition to the >> UX, you also get a WAY bigger, TV-size screen. However, the roll-your-own with Chromecast does not address the other use cases. Which is why I think this is a great product opportunity for Apple (or Google, or Microsoft, but especially for Apple).

This is probably not an Airpods or Watch-sized market, but it is surely in the millions, in the US alone. Plus it would have strategic value, in strengthening the overall Apple ecosystem value proposition.

Bigger batteries would be so worth it

The achilles heel in the lifecycle of a lot of rechargeable devices is battery life. Lithium Ion batteries diminish steadily, often in 3 years they are about half of what they were when new. For a lot of products, I think a reasonable solution would be just provision them with a bigger battery to start. Instead of making each generation of mobile phones a bit thinner, use that space for more battery.

I was a devoted user of the Jabra Elite 65t earbuds for 5 years. The main reason I replaced them was battery degradation. When they were new, battery life was good, not great. I use them in large part for conference calls, so maybe 4 hours, with the case providing about 8 more hours. So I could often get by charging them once mid-week. By the end, I had to charge them every day, and on heavy days, they needed a top-up.

The replacement Soundcore A40 are a decent upgrade, but not all that huge, for being a 5-years-later product. The one area they really shine, though, is battery life. Out of the box, they get 6-8 hours battery life, and the case has 4X charges (vs 2X for Jabra). They almost always last all week.

Like a Kindle, even when you get the low battery warning, you probably easily have a day left (including what's in the case). It's great, more than I really need. But the beautiful thing is, even if it degrades by a full 50%, it will still be very, very good!

EU USB-C Mandate: Compromise via a Sunset Provision

With the advent of USB-C, the device world has been approaching common-standard nirvana. To-date, Apple has remained the stubborn holdout ruining the fun. Maybe Apple would have cleaned up their act this year on their own, but it's hard to know, since the EU did it for them, with a 2024 mandate to standardize on USB-C.

Very few people, I think, disagree with the outcome of this particular regulation, but you do hear various degrees of concern about prescriptive mandates. I.e., maybe a company would innovate and produce a superior connector, better to let the market decide.

I think building a sunset provision into regulations like this would be a pragmatic compromise. E.g., let the regulation expire in 4 years. That leaves a reasonably foreseeable time horizon where USB-C is completely adequate, so by the time any hypothetical innovation is mature, the path will be clear for testing it in the market.

At the same time, the arrangement should remove any motivation to game the system. E.g., after switching to USB-C, Apple isn't likely to switch back when the regulation expires.

Dabbling with Home Automation

TL;DR

Kasa smart plugs and light switches work well and are very affordable. If you are curious about home automation, you can experiment with little effort and at a cost of $15-$100. The plugs are super-simple, the light-switches require very basic electrical wiring competency.

More

I've begun dabbling with home automation, mostly for lighting. I have purchased the Kasa EP25 smart plugs (4 for $40) and Kasa Smart light switches (<$30) that are well-reviewed by Wirecutter.

One of the light switches is motion-sensitive. I'm still fine-tuning it, but seems to work well. In hindsight, I would say if you think there is any possibility you want motion-detection, get it, because it doesn't cost much more, and you can turn it off if you don't want it.

Setup of the smart plugs was reasonably easy. The hardest thing is the fact that they only operate on 2.4 Ghz wifi, and require the setup device (smartphone) to be on the same band. Since phones will generally default to 5.0 Ghz, this requires going into your router control panel (not hard, but you may not remember how to access it or the password), and temporarily turning off 5.0 Ghz (don't forget to turn it back on).

Installation of the switches was not hard, and I rarely do electrical work. There is one gotcha, which is the volume of the plug is>> than a dumb plug, and you may have a hard time jamming it all back in the box.  I'm sure a pro could manage it, perhaps by trimming excess ground and neutral, but I wasn't up for that. After some searching, I came up with a pretty good work-around: these $5 box extenders.

The Kasa app is pretty good, and the plugs, though not the switches, are HomeKit-compatible.

My #1 need was to provide good & reliable wall-switch illumination of rooms that didn't have overhead lighting. Each room had the typical (1) switch-controlled outlet. So that takes care of one light, and doesn't require any smart stuff to work as expected. That was important, I don't want an over-complicated home where a guest can't turn on a light without installing an app. Then the other lights in the room are connected to a smart plug, which is triggered to go on with the smart switch. All works well, albeit with a ~3-second latency of the additional light to go on.

I also automated the fan in our bedroom that provides "white noise". It is on the floor in the corner, and my aging back dislikes stooping to turn it on and off. So I put it on a timer that corresponds to bedtime + 1 hour.

Similarly, I have a foot-warming carpet in my office that I also have to stoop to turn on. And that I sometimes forget to turn off. So I hooked that up to a smart plug, and put a turn-off schedule for the end of my workday, in case I forget.

Our Christmas tree lights are also very inconvenient to reach, so those also went on a timer (though given they are LED, I think the energy savings is negligible). On that note, these plugs include energy monitors. It is mildly interesting to see how much energy different appliances consume.

Last, I have a Corsi-Rosenthal fan setup in the basement, where the cat lives. I like to run that a couple of hours a day, not for cooling but for filtering. That was easy to put on a schedule

So that's it for implementation experience so far. In the process, I did quite a bit of research--much more than was needed for my relatively straightforward use cases--so I will document that next.

I get that AirPods are great

But the newfound discovery of the freedom of wirelessness is hardly new. I've been using Bluetooth headphones for over a decade. I assumed they would catch on really fast, especially among younger people. So I have been surprised, over the years, how willing people are to tolerate tangly, wired headphones.

Bought a Desktop Computer

I just bought a desktop computer, for the first time in over a decade. When I left desktops, my rationale for going laptop-only was that you pay a relatively small price premium for the great virtue of mobility. The thing that has changed since then, of course, is that phones and tablets generally scratch the mobility itch. For casual email, web surfing or social medial phone is fine--I have a 7" tablet, but I hardly even use it. Anything serious enough to send me to a full PC will also benefit from a good keyboard and, most of all, a nice, big, high-res monitor.

So far, it's really nice. Blazingly fast, almost perfectly silent--it takes a lot to get the fan to come on.

My one complaint--and it is not trivial--NO BUILT-IN WIRELESS!! I couldn't believe it. Did not even occur to me to check if this was an included feature. I happened to have an Edimax multi-use router/range-extender/access point lying around, so the problem was easily overcome, but this was a major disappointment.

I will be interested to see how this machine ages. I future-proofed it as much as possible by insisting on 16 Gb of RAM, and an SSD (the latter is a no-brainer, I even required that for the most recent family laptops). I am hoping to get at least 4 good years out of it. By that I mean 4 years where I never think "I wish my computer were faster"--not just 4 years of "works ok".

High-Markup Peripheral: Washer Pedestals

You know those nice, modern, high-efficiency front-loading washers that have become the upper-middle-class standard in the last 5 years? Notice how big they look? It is true, they are a little beefier than their top-loading predecessors, but mainly it is because they are mounted on ~14" pedestal drawers. I think I have discovered why those pedestals are so popular--scooping all the laundry out of the capacious front-loader is unpleasant stoop labor.

The cost of those pedestal drawers though, is beyond belief. A quick, I think represetantive search on Amazon indicates $250-$350. Per drawer. If the machine costs $600 (on the cheap side compared to what some people pay, but that's what we paid for what I find to be a very nice unit), that is like 50% for a freaking drawer!!

Screaming business opportunity. Idea #1: create universal pedestals with adapters for specific makes. Idea #2: create a platform that fits both washer and dryer, with drawers underneath. Basically a pre-fab version of this kind of DIY project.

Vendor Opportunity (and Moral Imperative?)--Take Care of User's Data

In the latest episode of  Accidental Tech Podcast, the boys, mainly Siracusa, were discussing the fact that: one, devices don't automatically back up user's data, notably their precious photos; two, they should; and three, it seems like a great customer delight and vendor differentiation opportunity for Apple.

I definitely agree. But I feel like the problem is very, very close to solved. The major remaining ingredient being marketing. The obvious, and cross-platform solution, is Dropbox Camera Upload. I've been using it for about half a year on my Android phone, and it seems to work perfectly. Yes, at some point you will max out and have to buy space, but that point is reasonably high, at least if you exclude videos.

But even if you hit that point, there is the opportunity to buy a lot more space for a moderate incremental cost. It's a great freemium play, that has been very successful for Dropbox, the company. I can hear Siracusa objecting at this point, that consumers won't pay to increase their space when it maxes out. That's where the missing ingredient of marketing and partnerships comes in. On the Android side, a number of devices, including the popular Galaxy S III and IV phones, have included 50 Gb of free Dropbox space with the phone activation.

So I don't see why Apple couldn't do the same thing. The missing ingredients are really around the marketing and economic integration (no user decisions involved). It seems like both of those could be easily solvable by Apple. And I agree with Siracusa, it seems like a nice differentiation and brand-identify building opportunity for any vendor that solves it well.

Why doesn't seem interested in doing this is anyone's guess. I can see how Apple wouldn't be too excited about featuring a third-party solution, like Dropbox, prominently in its brand identity. Wait--maybe that's the answer! Apple is still miffed that Dropbox founder Drew Houston turned down Steve Jobs' offer to buy his company. Well, maybe they could work out a private-label solution with Dropbox. Or build their own service--it would be a much simpler build than Dropbox, since it wouldn't have to create the illusion of magic across all platforms.

An alternative is Google+ photo backup service. Also cross-platform. In contrast to Dropbox, it provides much more space. Admittedly it decreases resolution, but half a loaf is much better than none. Plus, if you want, there are options for preserving full resolution. Surprisingly, Google hasn't done all that much to promote this. Another lost marketing opportunity.

NOTES
[1] Of passing interest, to me at least, is that Siracusa mentioned an old idea he had, from the hard drive era, of providing better-than-nothing, transparent consumer backup via RAID-1 configuration, as an OEM-provided feature, again as a means for differentiation (his article here). I had blogged  about this very idea, including the opportunity for brand differentiation, right around the same time.

[2] This doesn't cover the no-access-to-a-data-connection edge case, admittedly. But I think that is a pretty small one. It does address the bandwidth caps problem, reasonably well, as both Dropbox and Google+ Auto-Backup have configuration options for wireless only.

"No One Uses Smart TV Internet Because It Sucks"

Got to agree with this article, but I would go further. The useability, even for the primary purpose of TV-and DVR-watching, of Comcast and DirecTV software is wretched. This is another industry that is ripe for disruption by Google or, more likely, Apple.

Lots of tweets and articles about how Apple's replacement for Google Maps is a self-inflicted fail. While on the subject of dumb Apple decisions--I can't believe they didn't take much flack for making the making the back of the iPhone 4s out of glass. Yeah, sure, let's go out of our way to deliberately make it extremely fragile.

iPhone 5: More Fetishizing "Build Quality"

John Gruber goes on, and on and on:

Is it worth devoting the first 750 or so words of this piece to the iPhone 5’s surface appeal? I don’t know how else to convey the niceness of this thing. This iPhone 5 review unit is the single nicest object in my possession. I own things that cost and remain worth more (e.g. my car). But I own nothing this nice. It sounds hyperbolic to put it that way, but I offer this observation with no exaggeration.

I think this is absolutely ridiculous. It's just a phone, people.

Wireless Chargers in Cars

Too expensive, probably not based on the Qi standard, but definitely the wave of the future (in cars, and out).

The wireless charging system consists of a dedicated charging “mat”, placed inside the center console where users can simply toss their compatible devices, start their car up, and begin charging.

Phones: Silly, Apple-Inspired Fetish about "Build Material"

I really don't get the fixation so many reviewers and smartphone enthusiasts have on "build materials". It's just a phone, not jewelry, and will likely be replaced in 2 years, max. Subtle aspects of physical appearance are just not that important.

To me, the most important considerations are: 1) reliability--primarily resilience when you drop it; 2) weight; 3) cost. Intangibles about look and feel come a distant fourth, especially since they are largely canceled out when you put your phone in a case of some kind--which is usually still a good idea. A ceramic backplate may help ensure there is no *visible", cosmetic damage when you drop the phone, but I don't think it protects the innards from from the impact, which is the bigger consideration. Nothing protects better than a rubbery coating, and of course that covers up most of the cosmetics related to build materials anyway.

My wife has a Tmo Galaxy S2, the huge one. Yes it is noticeably lighter and thinner than my 4.3" HTC Sensation. Not a deal-breaker difference, but those qualities are more valuable to me than the intangible cosmetics related to build materials.

I "blame" Apple for the obsession with build materials and look and feel.

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Wireless Charging: Apple Is Missing A Lock-In Opportunity

A big component of Apple's strategy is lock-in. Apple's version of lock-in is somewhat subtler than some--the average Apple customer probably doesn't think "damn, I'm locked in", they just think "hmmm, might be interesting to try Google Music/Android Phone, but I've already got this big investment in iTunes/iOS Apps".

So I'm surprised Apple hasn't targeted wireless charging as a high-potential avenue for lock-in. Wireless charging has been around for a few years, it seems like a clear crowd-pleaser to me. There is a consortium trying to create an industry-standard (Qi), but it seems to be moving very slowly.

I think Apple could swoop in, and make all their devices wireless-chargeable--using a proprietary approach, of course. The wireless-capable batteries would be standard, the profit would come from the external chargers. With their economies of scale and power to move markets, Apple could make it all more affordable than anyone else. Overnight, the huge iOS ecosystem would be committed to Apple's proprietary charging technology, creating one more barrier to Apple users even trying non-Apple products.

Bada: Samsung Following the Path of Sony?

I don't think anything more of Samsung Bada's potential now than when I first heard of it. Who knows what they really have in mind, but if they seriously think they have a chance of making Bada a smartphone contender--I think they are smoking the same stuff that led Sony to become a shell of what it once was.