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After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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The newer Ecobee's can run entirely locally through their homekit integration. I tie mine into home assistant and use it that way. I would never have bought the device if that wasn't available.
If this old version doesn't have that available then I'm assuming people purchased it knowing that it was reliant on cloud services. It would be nice if they offered customers options besides just letting the device turn into e-waste but you can understand why they don't want to burn development hours on a device that's a decade and a half old.
Just another reason to never buy devices that can't function without a cloud service.
I don't understand the mindset of people who buy these things in the first place. Occasionally there's an article like, "guy's entire house suddenly inoperable after Amazon ban," people just don't think that will happen to them? It is local control on a standardized protocol or nothing for me.
Today yes, not 16 years ago.
Probably because this came out 16 years ago, before HomeAssistant even existed, it will still maintain wifi support for checking and controlling with your phone even after they cut off the cloud connection, and all their new products do have a local API and can still be used with HomeAssistant or whatever other local home automation server you have.
Furnaces last 20-30 years....
Zero excuse. Hell I know people with a 30 year old tstat.
It's a switch, on/off on temp. Everything else is fancy crap that they can shut off forcing you to buy again.
The switch part will still work. How are you not getting this?
Cause I didn't bother to read it and I assumed standard business practice.
Yeah. The server and software should be open source and API available. That way we actually own the system and don't have to just toss it out if someone goes out of business.
Fucking ulock for example suddenly wants me to create an account and sign in to their website to use my front door lock! What the fuck is that! We need consumer protections for this sort of shit. I didn't sign up to giving away when I come in and when I go out of my house! WTF to the max!