I consider the original Nest Learning Thermostat one of my best tech purchases. The green options and money-saving bits are pretty cool, and I like how it can set temperatures higher or lower when the house is empty. But I love being able to change everything from my phone. I don’t have to try and haul myself upstairs because I’m chilly, and that makes a difference.
Then Google comes along and ruins everything by dropping support for it. It will still work if I haul myself up those stairs where I can touch it, but what I need (really, what many disabled people need) is going away, and I won’t be able to control it through an app on my phone. What the hell, Google?
Needless to say, I’ll be buying another smart thermostat because they do make my life better. But it won’t be a Nest. In fact, I’m done buying Google’s smart home stuff for good. Ecobee has what looks like a good option, and maybe even Honeywell makes something that doesn’t use a terrible app interface, so I’m exploring.
I do understand how the consumer electronics game works (yes, it’s a game and you never win), so I don’t expect Google to continue to provide active support for a 10-year-old product. I’m not asking for that, especially for free.
But why remove the most useful and basic feature? Why not offer an option to use it until it breaks without seeing any significant updates? Why not offer a service I can pay for to keep using it like Microsoft does for older, but critical, products? The only reason I can think of is that you know people will buy a new one. That’s both evil and shitty.
A thermostat is not a phone. The thermostat I replaced with my Nest was 30 years old. It worked fine, even though it never once got any sort of wild electronic update because mercury switches and thermocouples don’t need them. A Nest thermostat doesn’t need any updates either, once things work as expected. They just arrived to bring new features.
Keep those features. Google never once sent me one I asked for because I never asked. I want a thermostat to work the way it’s supposed to work out of the box and to keep working that way until some random act of an angry god makes it stop.
I know “planned obsolescence” is a longstanding tech conspiracy theory, and I try not to buy into those. But in this case, nothing else fits. Maybe all this is because Gemini is replacing other things, and the Google Home app needs to change. Maybe it’s something else.
What I do know is that I don’t care. I just want to be able to change the temp without touching the thermostat like I’ve been doing for 10 years.
