THE MORNING RANT: Lodging Made Torturous by Smart Appliances and Electronics - “The Big Regression”

When vacationing, my wife and I are tending to once again stay at hotels rather than renting through VRBO or Airbnb. While we prefer to rent an apartment/condo with a kitchen, laundry room, full size bathroom, and additional living space, the unrelenting hassles involving appliances and electronics is pushing us back to hotels. (As well as the detailed and lengthy “clean-up” instructions we’ve encountered at some places, but that’s a subject for another day.)

It has effectively become part of our unpacking process when we arrive at a rental property to contact the property manager so we can learn how to set the thermostat and operate the TV.

In a crazy paradox, the more “luxurious” the rental unit is, the more complex and user-unfriendly it tends to be. For me, having to watch training videos and download apps before I can set the thermostat or run the dishwasher is not luxury, it’s torture. Programming the lighting through a tablet on the wall is excruciating when I realize that something less upscale would offer me a simple light switch.

Jason Fried, a tech executive who co-founded Basecamp, wrote about this problem at “Hey,” another of his software companies. I first read this essay in its entirety on Mr. Fried’s Twitter/X page, but he also has it posted under the title “The Big Regression” at his website.

My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state-of-the-art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, [Internet of Things] appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression.

The lights are powered by Control4, and require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse.

The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling user interface just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up. Worse.

The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it with an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse.

Thermostats... Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait... What? Which number is this? Worse.

The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the f***ing weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse.

And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.

Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see it in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But we haven’t evolved to that point yet.

It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human that’s modern.

Preach, brother. Preach. Thank you.

For me, simplicity is luxury. An absence of apps is luxury. Not having to watch a training video is luxury. Not having to engage with a wall-mounted tablet is luxury. Those are the luxuries I want when traveling.

Related Business Idea – “The Hostelry TV”: As noted in Mr. Fried’s back-to-basics rental unit in Montana, everything was old-school except for the TV, which was still a burden. There is a business opportunity in the tech / media space for someone to develop a simple, user-friendly TV for hostelries that works like a hotel TV of old, in that the guest simply clicks “Power” on the remote and can then start changing channels with the “Channel” button. Perhaps it might be a 32” desk-top TV (with larger wall-mounted options) and a simple, proprietary remote, along with immediate access to what might have been called “basic cable” in the old days. The TV would immediately connect to the internet via Starlink, or some such. Tech bros could figure that out pretty quickly, I presume. The Hostelry TV manufacturer could contract with one of the streaming services to have the basic cable bundle ready to go. There has got to be a way to provide simple, traditional TV access to patrons of hotels and lodging facilities.

Other Things I’m Writing About

My latest piece at The American Spectator has been published, titled “While Canada Cozies Up to China, Mexico Imposes Harsh Tariffs Due to Chinese Auto Dumping.”

Mexico made a mistake in letting itself become a dumping ground for China’s excess automobile production. (Which, by the way, is overwhelmingly gasoline-powered vehicles, not electric, despite the media buzz about Chinese EVs.) Mexico is finally trying to undo the damage with stiff tariffs on Chinese vehicle imports.

Allowing Chinese vehicles into a market is not “free trade.” China has excess capacity of government-subsidized vehicles, which it is dumping into new markets, causing great harm to existing auto manufacturing operations. Many of these vehicles are manufactured by state-owned entities, whose primary purpose is to provide jobs in China, not to make a profit. Mexico has learned how damaging this trade structure is. Canada would be wise to take note.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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