<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Dragony</author><text>I actually worked on an App for a company that made home appliances. Originally they made everything local, so direct App to Washing machine communication. They had a really hard time with that approach for a number of reasons.&lt;p&gt;The first, and most obvious, reason is that getting your phone and (all) your appliances on the same network is non-trivial. Especially for a novice user. Sometimes the washing machine is in the basement and can&amp;#x27;t connect to your WiFi. Or maybe you&amp;#x27;re simply outside your house in your car and can&amp;#x27;t connect to your local network. The cloud approach solves this.&lt;p&gt;The other, not so obvious reason, is that the manufacturer made a ton of devices. Some of them a decade old, with very rudimentary interfaces. Originally the App had to handle special cases and workarounds for dozens of devices. This became a problem once they tried to port it to multiple platforms. For Android and iPhone they started with a shared C++ library. But that quickly became a problem, once they wanted to interface with popular home network and automation solutions.&lt;p&gt;To solve all this they decided to build a cloud API that would resolve all these problems in one go. A single, unified API with a modern HTTP interface and available via the internet. That solves the workaround and compatability issues by having a single abstraction layer (instead of one per app). It solves the &amp;quot;on the go&amp;quot; problem when you&amp;#x27;re not in you local wifi. It enables you to control devices outside your home network in a true IoT sense.&lt;p&gt;I totally agree with you that, if you&amp;#x27;re not in an urban environment with good internet and cell coverage, the advantages dwindle away. Also, of course, there is the privacy concern that is very real. At the end of the day the cloud solution is selected for the same reason companies select Electron. It saves development time and is very easy for the average end user to use. At the expense of performance and privacy.</text><parent_chain><item><author>belugacat</author><text>Great hack, but I’m sure any engineer worth their salt winces at the thought of a machine in their home roundtripping through far away 3rd party servers (I guess they’re the manufacturer’s, but if it’s hardware I own in my house those servers are 3rd party to me) just to notify them of a numerical value when they’re sitting literally 10 meters away (I live in the countryside and experience internet interruptions not infrequently, things running locally matter a lot to me).&lt;p&gt;I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB&amp;#x2F;firmware&amp;#x2F;schematics&amp;#x2F;etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.&lt;p&gt;If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Displaying My Washing Machine&apos;s Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth</title><url>https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/displaying_my_washing_machines_remaining_time_with_curl_jq_pizauth.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nonethewiser</author><text>I’d pay more for NO firmware in my washing machine.&lt;p&gt;This is beyond my desire to just keep things simple. What is the point of washing machine you can control remotely? You have to put clothes in at the start and take them out at the end. It offers no convenience.</text><parent_chain><item><author>belugacat</author><text>Great hack, but I’m sure any engineer worth their salt winces at the thought of a machine in their home roundtripping through far away 3rd party servers (I guess they’re the manufacturer’s, but if it’s hardware I own in my house those servers are 3rd party to me) just to notify them of a numerical value when they’re sitting literally 10 meters away (I live in the countryside and experience internet interruptions not infrequently, things running locally matter a lot to me).&lt;p&gt;I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB&amp;#x2F;firmware&amp;#x2F;schematics&amp;#x2F;etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.&lt;p&gt;If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Displaying My Washing Machine&apos;s Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth</title><url>https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/displaying_my_washing_machines_remaining_time_with_curl_jq_pizauth.html</url></story>