How the Smart Remote Lost Its Way

Quin Werthauer was enjoying a cup of coffee in his kitchen when he heard the news. “Oh, shit,” he thought as he read the email on his phone. “They finally did it.”

For the past decade, Werthauer has run a repair store for Logitech Harmony remotes out of his home on Long Island. A client had sent him word that the company was giving up on the product line and that it would no longer manufacture what had become the gold standard in remote controls. It would sell off whatever stock remained and keep adding to its sprawling database of supported devices. But otherwise, kaput. Powered off. Sent to that big charging cradle in the sky.

That last Friday’s announcement came as an unceremonious post in the Logitech support forums perhaps speaks to just how little the company has valued Harmony in recent years. Logitech hadn’t released a new Harmony device since April 2019, and CEO Bracken Darrell first suggested he might jettison the entire line six years before that. The writing has been on the wall, the floors, the ceiling, the sconces, you get it. If anything, it’s surprising that Harmony lasted as long as it did.

And now that it’s gone? That’s pretty much it for the smart remote, at least in the way that Harmony embodied it: a single controller to rule them all, with its own interface and touchscreen and deep bank of devices burned into its digital brain. A remote that you can program to execute a cascading sequence of actions—turn on the TV and the Blu-ray player and switch the input and start the movie—with the press of a single button. Universal remote buying guides, to the extent anyone produces them anymore, typically comprise various tiers of Logitech devices.

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