My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don’t.
It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible.
Light switches, which have been self-explanatory since the dawn of electric lighting, apparently now come as an unlabeled multibutton panel that literally required a tutorial session from a technician. Pressing the same button twice might turn the lights on and off, or you might have to press one button for on and another for off. “It depends” is the name of the game — which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.
[Jacob Sweet: The microwave makes no sense]
The TV is a recent model from Samsung. The picture is great, once it finally boots up — after you’ve spent way too long staring at a black screen wondering if you hit the power button or not, then hitting it again and realizing you just switched the whole thing off even though it never seemed to be on in the first place. And of course you can’t simply turn the TV on to find the last channel you were on; you have to navigate a menu of countless apps you probably don’t subscribe to. Watching TV feels more like a cognitive test than a way to relax.
The kitchen is also pointlessly complicated. My mom, the rental-company-supplied tech guy, and I stood around the Miele dishwasher, repeatedly bashing buttons just to get it to show signs of life. We checked the power to make sure it was plugged in. It was. More button pressing; still nothing. Finally, we noticed a QR code, along with a note encouraging us to register the appliance with an app. Wait — was that required to turn it on? The dishwasher had never been used before, which meant another call to the rental company to have them sort it out for us. The oven was equally perplexing. The controls are obtuse icons with no tactile feedback, hidden behind smoked black glass. I have a different brand at home, with its own black-glass display. After five years, I still have no idea what the chef’s-hat icon means.
On to the thermostats. When we got there, it was hot. But how hot, exactly? Round touch screens in various rooms took us through a labyrinth of tiny-text options just to set the temperature to 68 degrees. Or was it already at 68? We finally managed to select the temperature we wanted only to discover that a preset schedule overrode our choice, and we’d have to figure out how to override that.
The alarm system is operated in two places — from a device near the front door and another in the primary bedroom — by what are essentially iPads bolted to the wall. At my house, the alarm system has nine raised buttons on it for the code, and a couple more for common controls, such as dialing 911. Perfect. We have no idea how to operate these new screens. But they are screens, so they have to do something. Day and night, they show us the weather forecast.
Even getting inside the house is complicated. A digital lock on the front gate requires a four-digit PIN, but the PIN doesn’t work — the builders, it seems, never connected the lock to a power source. Instead, you’re supposed to enter the code into a different keypad panel that’s mounted to the wall next to the gate. Mercifully, you can ignore both the dead little computer bolted to the gate and the functioning one nearby it because the gate also comes equipped with a keyhole, and a key you can stick inside.
On top of all this tech floats a layer of lag. Flip an old-school light switch and the light comes on instantly. Tap an old-school remote and, after a blast of shimmering static, you’re watching TV. Press a button on these new systems and there’s a long pause before something happens — if anything happens at all.
I’m no Luddite. I run a software company! I see the allure of high-tech gadgets and have fallen for their promises before. When my wife and I built a house more than a decade ago, we opted for all kinds of automated systems: low-voltage controls, mechanized blinds, irrigation systems that measure rain so the sprinklers come on only when you need them. We regretted it almost immediately. What we discovered is that this stuff requires setup, which can take more time than just doing things manually, and is maddeningly glitchy, forcing you to pay someone handsomely by the visit or the hour to fix your appliances for you.
Tech makes many things better, but you shouldn’t have to learn how to use a house. You shouldn’t need a tech tour and an app (or five) to turn the heat down or clean the dishes. You shouldn’t have to worry that pressing the wrong button will set off a chain of events you don’t know how to undo. All these powerful processors and thousands of lines of code have succeeded in making everyday things slower, harder to use, and less reliable than they used to be.
[Ellen Cushing: There are two types of dishwasher people]
Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it. A light switch used to have one job, and it either did it perfectly or it was very easy to find out why it didn’t. Today’s digital replacements are too sophisticated for their own good. They’re hard to integrate with one another and even harder to troubleshoot when they don’t work. Is it this thing? That thing? Both things? Something else entirely?
My wife and I are in the middle of another home renovation, and this time we’ve decided to go the good old analog route: switches you flip, dimmers you turn, and thermostats with a pin pointing at a number on a dial. That’s what I call progress.
