Imagine getting out of bed to find a freshly boiled kettle of water awaiting you, calibrated to perfect tea-brewing temperature. That’s what the iKettle 2.0 promises its users—which is great, except when you run into technical difficulties, as Mark Rittman did this morning:
A simple task achievable with analog tools, needlessly complicated by a digital equivalent—that’s the problem with the Internet of Things and “smart homes” (and it’s neatly encapsulated in the Twitter account known as Internet of Shit, which shared the above tweets).
Achieving a smarter smart home is something that’s being relentlessly pursued by the world’s biggest tech companies. In the meantime, it might be time to stock up on firewood.