Curious what products looked amazing on paper and in reviews, but disappointed in real daily use.
Comments
By SoftTalker 2025-12-261:177 reply Any home tech gadgets. Robot vacuums, smart lights, smart thermostats, internet connected TVs and appliances, most kitchen gadgets especially if they require power. None of it lives up to the hype and it's all e-waste in a couple of years if not sooner.
Can't speak to most of those but smart lights are pretty nice.
I made sure to buy zigbee ones so that I'm just tied to home assistant which even if it goes out of business will still work with whatever binaries I've downloaded already (as well as it works locally so I can control them during internet outages). I'm sure somebody else can explain why you should get Thread or Matter nowendays but I never bothered to learn the differences.
But yeah, the average life of a company is what 1 year? Don't get any product you want for more than 5 years from a company younger than 5 years if you need that company to exist for it to work.
By grigio 2025-12-2616:43 Zigbee + Home Assistant is the best future-proof combo
This is the sort of thing that makes me worry about my solar inverter, battery etc. so much remote management stuffed into these things.
By Gud 2025-12-2623:24 Just make sure it follows open standards and you’ll be fine.
By reaperducer 2025-12-263:474 reply smart lights are pretty nice… I made sure to buy zigbee ones
The connectivity doesn't matter when it's the actual filaments/LEDs that burn out after only a year or two.
Even buying a big name like Sylvania doesn't help. I had eight Sylvania smart bulbs burn out or go into endless flicker fits in under a year. They're all in a landfill now.
Of course, that's better than when Feit Electric sent out a firmware update that deliberately bricked all of its smart bulb controller boxes with nothing more than an e-mail telling people it was done. (This was before Apple Home or Google Home existed.)
By bradlys 2025-12-263:56 I haven’t had this issue at all and I’ve had some of my Philips Hue bulbs for close to ten years.
Mind you, one would expect them to work for a long time considering they’re (probably) the most expensive on the market.
Isn't switches just more brittle and less control?
I can set individual colors and intensity on the lights as well as with a dumb switch I can also have the lights just come on so if I were to sell the house or whatever the next person wouldn't need to have home assistant to work anything in the house.
The hope is that with smart switches, no one needs home assistant to work anything in the house either - they get a UI they have had their whole life, a simple switch or toggle button. The smart part is an optional extra guests don't have to worry about, they just use lights the way they've always used lights.
You can't control color easily, but you can get dimmable smart switches. I find for most lights, I don't change the colors pretty much ever. YMMV.
By moepstar 2025-12-2714:32 If switch changes state to on, set scene depending on daytime (or other conditions) - should suffice?
To change for another scene, have a button or voice command?
I’m with you here - make control „as usual as possible“, also saves a ton of money and annoyances - and most important: home automation is about automation, not controlling manually via phone…
By cbull 2025-12-2621:39 You must have some funky electricity at your place, I have two smart bulbs (a TP-Link wifi and a generic Zwave) that get daily use and have been running fine for 7 years now.
Robot vacuums are the worst. I have to help it every thirty minutes. And anytime I close a door or move something it wants to create a new map. The old randomized ones were actually better.
By registeredcorn 2025-12-262:011 reply What kind of Robot Vacuum did you have? I had mine map the house once downstairs, and once upstairs and it's been fine navigating around stuff ever since. It comes into the kitchen area while I'm cooking and will eventually just come around for a second pass after my feet are out of the way. I have the roborock Q5+.
The only complaints that I have are:
1) I have mine set to notify me when it's done cleaning. Sometimes it will do it immediately after it's done, while other times the notification might come two or three hours after the fact. Still other times, not at all.
2) I have to clean the vacuum more frequently than I would like. That means: cutting out hairs from the "side brush" on the front of it, cutting hairs out of the "main brush" that sucks up most of the debris, and wiping the sensors clean. In fairness, I'd probably have to do the same sorts of thing with the rollers on a normal vacuum cleaner after a while too, though.
3) There's been a handful of times over a 2-ish year period where it'll go to the other room to start cleaning, and while a normal trip might take 15-20 minutes, it'll claim to be done in about 5 minutes. I suspect that blankets may have fallen on the ground or something, so it became too "blocked" to be able to clean properly, but it could be some kind of software error.
By mentalfist 2025-12-266:58 > 1) I have mine set to notify me when it's done cleaning. Sometimes it will do it immediately after it's done, while other times the notification might come two or three hours after the fact. Still other times, not at all.
Check your mobile's app settings/battery optimisation? Sounds like the app doesn't keep running properly in the background
By olowe 2025-12-262:01 > The old randomized ones were actually better.
Exactly. We changed from some fancy one that my boss gave me to a cheap one that you operate with an old-school (can't believe I'm saying that) infrared remote. It doesn't "think". It just works like our other reliable dumb machines - diswasher and washing machine. We don't own a regular vacuum cleaner as I just do a regular sweep with a broom when we want a thorough job done.
All other home tech gadgets friends and family have acquired live in limbo land stored in the back of the draw or on top of the cupboard, never opened or tried once but got stuck downloading some stupid app. But we can't just throw it away yet, as there's guilt around acquiring that smart tech thing in the first place even though we know there's already so much e-waste.
By agsqwe 2025-12-2614:23 I've had the same issues until I got top of the line Roborock. It never loses map and almost never gets stuck, washes itself with water and drain connection. I'd rather not buy a Chinese brand but here we are...
By Waterluvian 2025-12-261:49 I was worried about this. Especially as a roboticist who deals with making tools to help people do this for fleets of robots. But I thought I’d try this $450 Eufy bot and the thing is pretty much foolproof. Just have to clean up the Lego first…
By kyriakos 2025-12-278:43 I never had problems with them, just avoid having lose cables. Mine works pretty much unattended in a 110sqm flat, just need to fill the water tank and empty the waste water every 4-5 days.
By illiac786 2025-12-263:03 Agree with everything in that list (and made many of these mistakes myself) but actuators (e.g. Shelly) in the wall behind actual switches were the exception for me. Especially for things which were not light switches, like blinds, sky lights, pumps…
By xthe 2025-12-2623:47 Same here. I tried a few smart home gadgets and the excitement faded fast. Apps broke, updates stopped, and they became more hassle than help. Simple non-smart devices have lasted way longer for me.
People want to spend money to fix a problem that fundamentally requires effort on their part, not tech.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
By mingus88 2025-12-262:12 Eh, our Roborock vac has been a net positive
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
By olowe 2025-12-262:24 Couple of anecdotes from the dev side.
I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.
There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.
By circuit10 2025-12-261:29 I like my smart light, though I only use it to turn the light off without having to get out of bed
By D13Fd 2025-12-2713:14 I agree except as to smart light switches, locks, and blinds. For me those have been set-it-and-forget-it devices that are really handy. I have various lights that come on from dusk until bedtime, doors that lock at night, lights that go off after 5 minutes (closets) or a couple of hours (kitchen). The blinds are blackout shades that go down at the kids’ nap times during the weekend. I also have a task light over a work bench that is controlled via my phone, since there is no wired switch there.
I set all this up over the course of several years, as needed, and haven’t thought much about it since. It’s nice.
Apple Watch. I'm not even sure when I last wore it, but it was at least 18 months ago.
Slighly laggy remote control for my phone, with widgets a little too small for my finger to reliably hit.
When I do proper long walks, the battery reliably dies on me during the walk.
I got a Garmin watch after being frustrated with the tech company watches lasting only hours on a charge. I charge this watch once a week and it does everything I realistically want from a smart watch: - shows notifications - tracks workouts - silent alarm clock - home assistant shortcuts
By MrMember 2025-12-2915:52 I'm a big fan of Garmin watches, it's really impressive what they've built. They're responsive, they have the smart features I want without the bloat I don't want, the battery lasts forever (if I don't use GPS at all it lasts something ridiculous like three weeks, with GPS it's still around a week). And they're so good I don't feel any urge to upgrade to a newer model even though the one I currently have came out in 2019. I bought it "renewed" 2.5 years ago at a significant discount and I could see myself happily using it for at least another 4-5 years.
By embedding-shape 2025-12-261:56 Garmin watches are great! I wish the lighter/smaller models also had solar charger, but last time I checked only the bigger "ultra-durable" ones had it, but they're not that comfortable to wear.
By beingfit 2025-12-264:05 I love my Apple Watch (it’s a few years old) and depend on it everyday to track things and keep me motivated to exercise and move. I do have to charge it for nearly an hour everyday, though like others have said I would prefer longer battery life (as opposed to getting a bigger and more expensive one like Apple Watch Ultra).
I wouldn’t be exaggerating when I say that it’s changed my life for the better. At the same time, I personally know people who have it but aren’t used to it or don’t use it for what it does best.
By myvoiceismypass 2025-12-2617:49 I switched to the Ultra 2 about a year and a half ago and the battery life is excellent - I don't have to charge daily, I can run or hike for several hours while listening to music or podcasts being streamed from the watch. It actually allows me to carry my phone much less, since the watch can make/take phone calls too & let me pay for things. The battery life on the apple watch I had before this one, was really abysmal though.
I cannot agree more. The battery not even lasting a day is what prevents me from using it. When I want to go for a run with it, it's always out of battery.
By johnfn 2025-12-261:21 I had this exact problem with my Apple Watch. My family got me an Ultra as a gift, and I really didn't think I was going to use it (I didn't even want it), but it ended up being a total gamechanger, and now the Ultra is my favorite gadget and a huge motivator to get into better shape.
My Apple Watch is now so old that it’s unsupported by new WatchOS, but the battery still lasts a day without problem. It probably helps that I disabled the always on screen. Lasting all day has never been a problem, though.
By beingfit 2025-12-265:43 Do you use it for workouts, especially for longer periods everyday? I’m a constant Apple Watch user and workout everyday, but I do find the battery life lacking when I’m out on hikes for a few hours. My watch is only a few years old and is supported for watchOS upgrades.
My guess is that the sensors use a lot of energy (even when the display is normally off) and that the longer one uses it for workouts within a day (with the sensors continuously on [1]) and the older the watch is, the lower the battery life.
[1]: there is a setting to in the workout app to reduce the frequency of GPS and heart rate readings during walking, running and hiking workouts when low power mode is also turned on
By harddrivereque 2025-12-261:244 reply I wanted to buy my so an apple ultra watch, is it a bad idea? It seems like a perfect thing that someone doesn't need that would.make a nice present
By D13Fd 2025-12-2712:38 I use Apple Watch Ultra constantly, it’s extremely worth it to me. The charging is annoying, but otherwise, the watch is amazing.
It keeps me on track every day. I have recurring alarms for my daily and weekly meetings/calls, and for life things like when it is time to pack up and get the kids out time to close things down and go to bed. Each morning I also set alarms for critical events that day. Basically I outsource the “scheduling” part of my brain to the watch and just focus on whatever I’m doing.
I also use it for a stop watch, cooking times, etc. I use it for GPS while hiking and biking. My phone running AllTrails can’t track a 25-mile bike ride through the mountains without dying, but the watch doesn’t even break a sweat.
Beyond that, it’s a great backup phone for when I leave my phone on the table or in the other room, etc. I also bind the button on the side to the flashlight feature, which I use almost every day. It’s not as strong as a phone flashlight but it’s instantly available and more hands-free. It’s so helpful for dealing with crying kids in the middle of the night. It’s nice when I don’t have a hand to hold a phone flashlight, like when I take the trash cans to the curb at night, etc.
Overall I get tons of use out of my Apple Watch every day.
By Aurornis 2025-12-261:30 My suggestion would be to start with a refurbished or last-gen normal watch on sale. See if they like it. Upgrade to Ultra a few years later if they do.
It’s a hit or miss product category. My wife and I like ours and most of my friends like theirs, but I have a couple friends who got a smartwatch and then never liked it. Would be a shame to buy an expensive one for someone who doesn’t even like it.
By Terretta 2025-12-263:45 The Ultra battery lasts a couple or three days.
The pulse, EKG, and blood oxygen are first rate.
Get a Titanium band (why doesn't Apple sell this?) and use a square design screen and it's a dress watch:
By mingus88 2025-12-262:25 It’s very subjective, like any jewlery purchase.
For instance I never liked the default band, but the Milanese loop is great. My wife never wore her series 5 but I got her a series 11 which is a few grams lighter and thinner and she wears it all the time now.
I was on the fence about getting an ultra but for some reason never liked the size and shape (big rectangle with a huge crown bulge) since I have small wrists. I ended up getting a garmin epix pro at a big discount which is slightly smaller and round.
At the end of the day they are great if you want to collect data on yourself. Even though my wife didn’t like her series 5 the hypertension features were worth trying a newer one.
I solved the battery problem with an ultra, but I couldn't solve what is consistently off heart rate monitoring.
It now feels almost unusual for it to get the heart rate correct. And I'm not talking about off by a few or feeling off. I'm talking about full on max heart rate when I'm doing a easy run or 1/2 and 1/3 off which is impossible to miss.
By jameswestgate 2025-12-2611:12 Try setting it a bit further back away from the wrist bones that stick up so that the sensors are in constant contact with the skin, and can illuminate the blood pulses in the vessels under the skin.
By Terretta 2025-12-263:47 Heart rate weirdness is usually watch band, but sometimes skin property.
By anonzzzies 2025-12-261:23 Yep, I am puzzled how so many people seem to like it that much.
Matias Sculpted keyboard. I definitely didn't expect it to be good, and since I got the first shipment, reviews didn't exist yet. Now they seem to accurately describe its problems.
Although it was a decent effort, their overall build quality is pretty cheap, and it's not good enough to recommend. I took a chance on their 2nd revision and it was at least good enough to keep for periodic use, but it really isn't worth buying atm. Half of the spacebar stops working nearly every day and I need to reset it
By reaperducer 2025-12-263:433 reply Matias Sculpted keyboard… Although it was a decent effort, their overall build quality is pretty cheap, and it's not good enough to recommend
I concur. I thought I'd save a few bucks by buying the Matias keyboard that looks like the Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad. After all, there are thousands of people on the internet who swear that Apple's prices are disconnected from build quality. It turns out the chattering masses online are wrong.
The Matias keyboard lasted all of a year. I ended up replacing it with the real deal from Apple, which is still going strong six years later.
More often than online "experts" would have you believe, you really do get what you pay for.
I think Matias is sort of notorious for stuff that looks good in theory, but is plagued by reliability issues they just can't seem to sort out. I didn't know it was possible to mess up a scissor switch keyboard, but apparently Matias found a way to do so.
They've also been trying for 10 years to make a 60% keyboard (see the infamous thread on geekhack). Granted they do seem to refund anyone who wants it, but it's hard to understand why on earth a keyboard would take 10 years to develop.
They're really good at identifying niche products and designing things to fit the target market, but not so good on actually manufacturing them.
> I didn't know it was possible to mess up a scissor switch keyboard, but apparently Matias found a way to do so.
That indeed does seem to be the sentiment, and seems true, but to be fair, Apple also botched their laptop keyboards to the point of class action for years. But the current Macbook Pro keyboard seems fine so far.
Apple was using a novel butterfly keyboard mechanism instead of standard scissor switches during that era. The M1+ MBPs went back to scissor switches.
By brailsafe 2025-12-272:39 Oh that's right, I thought the butterfly mechanism was just an Apple rebrand of the same thing that failed horribly
By brailsafe 2025-12-269:40 Ya I agree. Manufacturing is hard, but Apple has it generally locked in. Apple's greatest weakness has always been ergonomics. Their mice are built well, but they're little more than art projects in terms of usability. Their external scissor switch keyboards (I hated their older keyboards) have always been quite good for what they are, and if they made one in the shape of the sculpt, I'd try it. The magic trackpad is amazing, but I just find myself never reaching for it compared to my mx master 3
Maybe I got lucky - my Matias Quiet Pro has been fine (though I did have to replace one failing switch >10 years in) since ~2013 - possibly earlier, but at least since 2013.
By brailsafe 2025-12-269:47 Maybe, or they did. The switches on my Matias Sculpted only detract from the design imo. They feel crunchy and don't align well with their cutouts. I'm fully willing to believe that their reputation comes from not investing heavily in reducing the variability in their manufacturing process. Once a viable but far from imperfect product gets shipped, they might stop improving it, idk tho.
You'll be happy to know that the InCase Sculpt is being sold again, if you can buy one before they sell out. They're nearly identical to the old MS Sculpt, down to the obscure bug with the keyboard matrix. The only difference that you can tell from a side-by-side comparison with new old stock is that the key caps feel slightly coarser, and less velvety. The palmrest is actually updated to the original, plusher MS sculpt design (it was changed in a later revision)
I ended up getting the mWave from Kinesis which seems at least 85% great. My problem with the InCase version of the sculpt is that for the price, it would have to be much better build quality than the original. Incidentally, I gotta give credit to Matias on the palm rest upgrade in their version; despite the rest of their troubles, the palm rest material is way better than the original.
Problem with the original, is that it's a perfect shape, but it wears down too quickly and becomes a paperweight if the dongle is lost. The price is insultingly high for the almost exactly original
Can you write a short review comparing to the sculpt in terms of shape and tactile feel? The mwave seems to have a more pronounced bump just eyeballing it. And as someone who is comfortable with scissor switches, whether on a laptop or MS sculpt, I'm not sure how mechanical ones would feel.
By brailsafe 2025-12-269:28 The switches are much lighter to the touch, and although I also prefer scissor switches, I've grown to like the mWave switches too. The lighter switch feel causes some typos, and I'm not yet as fast on it as even my MacBook keyboard, but there's always an adjustment period. They're also a little louder than the sculpt, but nothing remotely close to other mechanical switch types, and I think I might even say it's just a different type of sound, since I can type more softly than before.
The palm rest is a more comfortable softer pad than the the o.g sculpt, but I find for me it does get a little sweaty. I take Adhd meds during the day and drink a shit ton of coffee, so tend have very sweaty hands. I can't yet speak to durability, but the sculpt palm rest starts looking tattered around the ~2 year mark, while the Matias palm rest is a replaceable piece of rubber with a fantastic velvety feel (I use it when I'm at the office).
Connectivity is way better than the sculpt, but it's a little finicky when switching between devices on Bluetooth, which I feel I might just be doing wrong and haven't tried to learn about yet.
I find that the keycaps have low quality printed characters on the mac version, and when the backlight is on, some keys are hard to read or don't shine through properly.
My biggest problem with this keyboard is that it has a small right shift key, a normal size left shift key, and arrow keys that I find less preferable to the sculpt. The small right shift key means it's harder to position my shoulders in an ideal way compared to the sculpt for my ridiculously large hands, and I have to contort my wrist a bit more than I'd like. I also just can't feel my way around the board as easily, since I used the shift keys and arrows as anchor points.
As I've gotten used to it a little more, this is becoming less of an issue.
For portability, the overall build feels more solid than the sculpt, which would sometimes get stuck keys if I'd throw it in my backpack and get a piece of dirt in there or something. The better connectivity is a huge relief, since I don't need to worry about a dongle for wireless, and/or can use a usbc cable if the batteries are dead. It seems a bit shorter but chonkier, and maybe weighs less.
So that's my review. 8.5/10, since some of these lean toward preferences rather than quality. I'm not as confident touch typing with it yet, maybe 70% as confident, but I think I'll keep it and refine that skill.
Additionally, although the printed/etched characters on the keycaps are low quality, I'm glad there's mac variant. I did use the sculpt overwhelmingly on my mac, and had to remap keys, which I'll now do if necessary on my windows PC for the minority of time I'm using it there.
