When I was looking to buy a new furnace for my house, one of the choices I had to make was with my thermostat. Did I want a simple dial to turn? Did I want four settings, eight settings, or some other group of settings? Did I want to splurge on a smart thermostat? Honestly, I considered it, but I didn’t go with a smart thermostat for one simple reason: you’re dependent on the company to keep your thermostat functional. Nest is shutting off the servers that power the Revolv Home Hub, leaving those users without a working thermostat.
Of course, Nest purchased Revolv in 2014, and it immediately took Revolv’s products off the market, and users were warned in February that their thermostats were going to go offline in April, but still, that’s a pretty bad time of the year to turn off people’s heat. After all, there’s still snow on the ground and there’s plenty of cold weather yet to come, and while a warning is nice, that’s still a $300 thermostat that someone’s going to have to replace.
Nest’s products have been online since 2011, but that’s no guarantee they’ll still be online in 2017 or beyond. Yes, Next is now owned by Alphabet and has Google’s money behind it, but services can go away at any point. Then you’re stuck with a smart thermostat without any smarts.
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