How “smart” should appliances be – or become?

Internet and smart-home-linked appliances are available, but user reaction has been lukewarm — for many reasons.

It’s hard not to notice the recent trend hitting even basic home appliances: adding “smart” features. That’s somewhat of a misnomer, as the smartness does not include suggestions such as “Hey, maybe you’re overcooking that roast?” Instead, it means adding Wi-Fi and Internet connectivity so the appliance or function can be monitored and controlled remotely, both from inside the house and away.

Consumers have not yet warmed to the concept. According to admittedly rough statistics, fewer than half the purchasers of basic appliances — clothes washer and dryer, stove, range, microwave oven, and refrigerator — have them connected, and many of those who don’t actually use the smartphone-based connectivity. After all, why do you need to use your phone to turn on the oven light when standing right in front of it?

There are also issues of reliable, consistent connectivity and security. Many units, such as clothes washers and dryers, are located in wireless dead zones in a house, so added network boosters are needed. Further, security is a real concern, and there’s no need to go into details here on how a poorly configured wireless link or access port can be a gateway for drive-by hackers.

The first question is: which appliances would remote access and control offer tangible benefits? At one end, you can envision benefits for functions such as the garage door opener, well-designed security systems, and house heating/cooling. In a middle ground, you might make a case for household lighting. Basic functions such as clothes washer/dryer, microwave oven, oven and range, and toasters are at the questionable end. Certainly, a typical middle-class home might have several dozen such items for which connectivity, monitoring, and control are at least plausible.

But that’s just the beginning of the “to be smart or not?” story. There are cost, complexity, and repair factors as well. Adding the Wi-Fi adds upfront hardware cost to the product, even for non-adopters, of course, and also adds to start-up headaches. What would be your response to a series of drop-down menus and settings when all you want is a piece of toast (Figure 1)? Will you need to install and learn the intricacies of a separate app for each appliance, or at least each brand of appliance?

As usual, we are told the answer to all these hassles is here and will be completed, this time in the form of a dreadfully named software standard called “Matter.” Incidentally, to whoever came up with this name and to the group that agreed it, I’d like to have a serious word with you! Matter is a global, open-source standard that aims to simplify the smart home ecosystem by allowing internet-connected devices from different manufacturers to simply and securely communicate.

I suppose it will eventually work with most appliances and household gadgets, but there are a lot of things that have to go right. It also assures common connectivity, but does not — and cannot — define the user interface look and feel for individual appliances.

As with most advices of this type, the challenge is in the details and persistence. Even if you eventually get it all running, what happens when a vendor upgrades their appliance’s firmware? Although the promise is that compatibility will remain unchanged, those of us in the real world know that’s a guarantee often voided. Do you want to spend all that time getting a basic appliance up and running and then allocate a regular fraction of your time (or someone you hire) to keeping it all going? Will you need a system tech at the ready who knows your system’s full details? Pretty soon, things get expensive in time and money as the frustration mounts.

Further, what’s their next step once a manufacturer has its “hooks” into you via their appliance? I read that the high-end 2023 GE Cafe oven inexplicably forces owners to connect to the Internet to turn on the air fryer feature, even though there is a button for it on the oven (gee, thanks.) Some vendors require that you go online and register the appliance before you can use it, even if that connectivity is not needed for the operation itself (I’m sorry, but I just wanted to do the laundry).

Other vendors claim that by observing what the home cook is doing, they’ll be able to “suggest” pertinent recipes (who knew there was a recipe gap out there), as shown in Figure 2, or even initiate useful cross-selling opportunities for paid subscription services.  Or is the real reason that the more they know about what you are doing, the more valuable the data is that they collect, re-use, sell, and leverage? I’ll let you be the judge on that one.

Of course, if your appliance is Internet-enabled, the list of available features could change due to a future software update, with new ones added or your favorites deleted (“sorry, but we no longer support your favorite low-heat frying setting”) – and Matter connectivity standard won’t help with that aspect.

To me, however, long-term cost and aggravation are equally looming issues. When a sophisticated appliance fails due to a problem with its circuitry, the repair is either impressively costly or not an option. Replacement boards, switches, displays, and similar items take too long to obtain or are simply unavailable, and that’s after just a few years on the market.

The harsh reality is that most homeowners expect 10, 15, 20, or more years of service from a basic appliance. That’s the case unless they follow the home decorator’s imperative that you stay trendy and update your stale home décor every few years – just ignore the cost and hassle. In other words, is shortening the useful life of these appliances by designing them for this form of obsolescence one of the real reasons for adding all this hi-tech functionality into otherwise mundane labor-saving appliances?

Maybe this is worrying about nothing, and vendors will at least still offer low-end solid appliances that are functionally complete without the need for remote access. Perhaps the automotive trend is instructive here, as cars are already swinging back from their increasing reliance on touch screens (a misnomer — they require looking at, as well) in place of traditional single-function buttons. Called “re-buttoning,” it is largely driven by consumer backlash and directives of the European Union. These mandate that critical functions such as windshield wipers and turn signals must be directly activated by a dedicated button or switch activation, not as a touch-screen function or subfunction.

Or perhaps the human-interface trend will the other way towards no-buttoning instead of re-buttoning. A manufacturer could postulate “why do we even need a front panel, with all the cost, issues, and limitations that implies?” Perhaps the appliance should be an anonymous box but with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth link that is initiated when power is applied. You buy the button-free microwave over or air conditioner, link it to your phone, and poof! – the phone becomes a virtual front panel, no need for a real one.

There’s already a trend in this direction. The useful and visible top-row user interface has been replaced in some high-style appliances such as a dishwasher, Instead, there’s a top-edge display/control panel that disappears when you close the door (Figure 3). Too bad you have no way to know how the unit has been set up, what it is doing, how much time is left, or other basic information.

Going all-remote via the customer’s smart phone makes logical sense from a technical and manufacturing standpoint, even if it is unwieldy, fault- and bug-prone, inconvenient, and more. I suspect that some appliance makers will do it and then tout it as the latest, greatest advance in labor-saving home-appliance technology and esthetics.

I’ll let you be the judge, and my hat is off to any early adopters for their bravery, if not their wisdom.

External references

PC Mag, “What Is Matter? The Smart Home Standard, Explained”
Wall Street Journal, “Why Do Smart Appliances Continue to Be So Dumb?”
EDN/Analog Angle, “How will “rebuttoning” affect analog I/O design?”