I am so salty about this. "Smart bulbs" with an app never appealed to me, but I found LED bulbs that operate from a simple remote and like, it should not have taken so long. We have an awkward lighting setup in our living room and now we have two of these little remotes for five bulbs on two circuits and the light can be any color! Or all colors! Dim for navigation and bright for task lighting! I should have had this a decade ago but the vast majority of products are IoT.
They're finally making robot vacuums/sweepers that don't connect to the Internet and why did it take this long?
I paid extra to get a fridge without Internet. Wtf.
My printer tried to lock out the generic ink. I don't remember how I fixed that but Jesus Christ, stop that. My goddamn CPAP has a cell modem. I suspect if I disabled it in the first year the insurance company would have repossessed it.
I've lived in my house for 19 years. I think we're on our fourth fridge because There Are No Good Appliances Left. The ice maker quit working two years ago. We didn't get it fixed. The countertop version we got lasted less than a year. I replaced it with a bunch cheaper model because if the "name brand" failed that fast I might as well go cheaper, fuck.
Every time Windows updates I have to lobotomize whatever new ai has been stuffed into it and fix the taskbar. I terminate customized advertising tracking with prejudice. I dumped chrome and am thisclose to switching to Linux, and I have been in the Microsoft ecosystem since DOS days. I haven't voluntarily used Word in 20+years. The version we have at home is older than that, on my husband's old work pc, because he looked at the subscription model and said fuck no, I already own one. I used Adobe CS2 for a ridiculously long time because upgrading from a program that perfectly cromulantly produced scads of magazines and books for me seemed ridiculous.
My phone tries to install bloat every time it updates. Sometimes it succeeds, but it's at least more usable than the one Samsung I bought... That was garbage.
And now they're trying to make building computers at home unobtainable, thinking everyone will outsource their brains to ai agents on their phones. Revolting. How has my computer appreciated in price of components in 3 years? Nonsense.
The amount of work I have to do to just get basic functionality. I should not have to argue with my air purifier about it connecting to the Internet. It shouldn't be worried about the Internet at all. No, you don't get network access. You're an air purifier.
Nowadays no one would be surprised about a violent gazebo.
