A smart home consumer's wish list

As a smart home aficionado that cares about privacy I rarely ever find a product that is a 10/10. I always want to see some small change. So here it is, a list of 5 concrete wishes. These are things I would pay (good) money for.

I'm a big Sonos fan. It offers an unbeatable combination of sound quality, price, design, product choices and multi room reliability. There are several things to dislike about Sonos of course, but my number one is the fact that while the speaker elements and amplifier themselves probably could last you 20 years, the embedded system can not. The split between S1 and S2 is fair to me, there will always come a time when the embedded system in the speakers just aren't powerful enough to handle the software.

I really wish Sonos would use a modular approach where you could swap the compute module and networking components for a newer and more powerful version. A compute module revision could be a complete revamp as the only specs it needs to follow is taking a certain voltage in and delivering sound out to the amp. Imagine a slide-in module that you could pull out and replace. A lot of people are wary of buying Sonos due to their mistreatment of deprecations in the past, this would go a long way to alleviate that. I don't foresee this happening, to the extent where it might is more reasonable to hope for a brand that comes up with good plug and play speakers on the open source OtterCast platform.

If a smart home gadget is programmable – as every cloud gadget is – then it should be required by law to offer the same API in a local-only fashion. For most smart home devices what I really want is to airgap it and only connect to it from my local network. Cloud support is great, and I accept that you might offer 10x value because in your cloud you might be running actually smart algorithms to help control my device (well, you actually should anyway).

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