However, we are talking about a thermostat here. When I bought my house, there were 40+ year old mechanical thermostats on the wall. I swapped them out because they were ugly and not programmable. I put in "dumb" Honeywell thermostats that don't connect to the internet and don't require software updates. Possibly they'll be here in 40 years, though I wouldn't be surprised if some capacitor or something fails, maybe I'll only get 20 years out of them.
Anyway, as a long-time Google user I've just been through this cycle too many times, mostly with web and phone apps, to seriously invest in them. The convenience of having everything in one place, in Google's cloud, also needs to be weighed against the annoyance of migrating things and learning new features whenever they decide to kill something off. If Obsidian dies, I'll take my .md notes to another editor. When Google Keep dies, who knows if stuff will carry forward or break like the Notes->Keep transition did for me.
Better to purchase from a company that’s business is what you’re buying, not a labs project at the mercy of whomever is floating through Google upper management at the time (imho).
https://www.macworld.com/article/675021/how-long-does-apple-...
I’m not mad at the lawnmower [2], it just is what it is. Google doesn’t care and likely never will, because of the incentive structure and culture of the org. “Does it hyper scale? Can we ignore the customers? Ship it.”
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147154/ecobee-smart-ther...
I replaced it with a super basic Honeywell mercury thermometer, which will almost certainly still be working 100 years from now.
I understand not wanting to support old hardware forever, but is it really that hard to lock this device down enough to only accept commands from Google servers? I just want to be able to tweak the temperature at night without getting out of bed.
I certainly won't be replacing it with their new model, even if they are offering a reasonable discount. I hear good things about Ecobee...
The backlash will come.