We’ve gotten too used to the price of tech being so low because we’re almost always the product. The Meta VR headsets, Alexa, Google Home, anything where data from us can be harvested, they’ll gladly subsidize to help get it into our homes.
I’m really hoping the HA voice stuff keeps getting better and better, we need it if we’re ever going to get people away from these data harvesting “assistants”
the prices for that aren’t even especially low, though.
remember, it’s also massively inflated because all the cutting edge fab capacity is being used to build entropy-and-scam machines, and before that, scamming machines. I remember when you could build a damn solid gaming computer with current gen hardware for 500$ without much sacrifice.
if you want to know what most of this actually costs, look at something like the MSRP on the raspberry pi. a general purpose chip that’s wildly overpowered for what 99% of these devices do.
look at how much you’ll pay for an esp32 or, if that’s too beefy for your application, an esp8266. arduino if you want prehistoric oldschool italian luxury. it’s like 5$ plus 0.10-15 dollars per sensor, and the fifteen dollar sensors are for exotic stuff like air quality. You don’t even have to code as often as not-somebody already made and open sourced it; you just need to play legos.
I’ve made some DIY smart home devices with some ESP32s, I know how much premade stuff can be overpriced for sure. I still want to make a TOF sensor for my water filter salt tank
We’ve gotten too used to the price of tech being so low because we’re almost always the product. The Meta VR headsets, Alexa, Google Home, anything where data from us can be harvested, they’ll gladly subsidize to help get it into our homes.
I’m really hoping the HA voice stuff keeps getting better and better, we need it if we’re ever going to get people away from these data harvesting “assistants”
the prices for that aren’t even especially low, though.
remember, it’s also massively inflated because all the cutting edge fab capacity is being used to build entropy-and-scam machines, and before that, scamming machines. I remember when you could build a damn solid gaming computer with current gen hardware for 500$ without much sacrifice.
if you want to know what most of this actually costs, look at something like the MSRP on the raspberry pi. a general purpose chip that’s wildly overpowered for what 99% of these devices do.
look at how much you’ll pay for an esp32 or, if that’s too beefy for your application, an esp8266. arduino if you want prehistoric oldschool italian luxury. it’s like 5$ plus 0.10-15 dollars per sensor, and the fifteen dollar sensors are for exotic stuff like air quality. You don’t even have to code as often as not-somebody already made and open sourced it; you just need to play legos.
I’ve made some DIY smart home devices with some ESP32s, I know how much premade stuff can be overpriced for sure. I still want to make a TOF sensor for my water filter salt tank
In the case of Google Home they’ve even had Spotify give them out for free!