Just because the internet of things was two hype cycles ago doesn’t mean we can’t still dunk on it.
if Tesla was a shoe
The only IoT-enabled device I have (or plan to ever have) is a single electrical plug that I keep my swamp cooler plugged in to. It lets me turn it on and off from the couch, and set schedules for it to come on when I’m out of town so my house stays cool enough for my cats. It’s genuinely useful and it was like $10. I’ve never really seen any other attractive use case for IoT shit–certainly not fucking shoes.
I’ve got a couple bluetooth plugs around my house that were given to me. I plug my lamps into them, so I can crawl into bed to read and then turn off the lights without getting up. One of the only cool things IoT has given us, I think.
Yeah, during the winter when I don’t need the swamp cooler, that plug goes on my bedroom lamp. I can sort of wrap my head around why people with a large house would want all lights and shit app-controllable, but that’s really as far as it goes. No, I do not want my refrigerator to have WiFi and a fucking app.
There certainly are very useful applications for IoT. For example, at my house it regulates heating. It probably saved like 30% on my heating, with the added bonus that every room is the exact temperature I want. Of course, this is all done locally on Home Assistant. If I can at all avoid it, I don’t want any IoT device that connects to someone else’s cloud.
Nike missed a chance to monetize shoe tying. They could have keep the app alive and charged - I dunno - ~25 cents a tie.
These shoes were so expensive when they came out. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal to keep supporting the app. It doesn’t mean they need to dedicate a dev team. …
Don’t they 100% have to dedicate development time to updating this thing? I’m not a big computer dork, but I’m pretty sure applications don’t just magically work with all device updates.
People need to just stop updating devices. Years of updates and what is it all for, just to require updates for your updates
We were using a fork we customuzed of an open source package (we will merge our additions but the team wants us to wait until they’re done with a major revision). At some point another upstream package made a fundamental change that broke everything. So we learned the hard way to have upper bounds on all required package version numbers lol. That was such a pain to investigate.
It shouldn’t take any development time, but the app stores are all run on over-caffeinated ferret logic, so yeah, they do need to have someone update.
Keeping things updated is like a week of work for one junior developer every few years. A small team could do it for a large company’s apps in perpetuity. But under the ideology of capitalist software management, keeping such a team around is functionally impossible. (They would have idle time, some manager would see that and give them extra work, then when the app updating job picked back up, that manager would convince everyone that the other work they were doing is more important than updating apps.)
“The app that ties my shoelaces has been discontinued.”
