Okay this sounds all very reasonable, but how do you know when your washing machine is finished, when it's not connected to the cloud and you won't get notified in your app? It sure is not an easy thing and the cloud helps very much here
Well, for people in an apartment it doesn't matter all that much, but if your laundry washer or dryer is in the basement, you don't necessarily hear it if you're out in the garden.
Sure, it might be a "nice to have" thing. But the machines usually show how long they'll take. And even if it's a newer one with sensors that make the whole process vary in time. I'd still be like "Oh, okay it'll take about 3 hours, so ill be back at 6pm". It doesn't really matter if the clothes chill out for about an hour, especially the newer machines don't stink that fast. And on top of that, I don't think that it has to go over the internet if you needed some sorta notification. Local would be suffiecient.
If I buy something new like this and have a few choices, I intentionally pick the one with as few smart features as possible.
I think you are joking, but I'll reply with a serious answer.
Where I went to college, our dorms had (free) shared washing machines. This was "pre cloud", but wifi was throughout. One student rugged up a hall-effect sensor and attached it to each power cable. It could detect if the washers and driers were on. It sent this info to a specific website that the students could monitor to see if there were any available washers or driers.
I wish washing machines had a fixed cycle duration. When I start the cycle my washing machines tells me the same duration, always, but in actuality it takes different amounts of time every time. Madness. I've been told this is a feature.
It actually is. Fixed length cycles haven't been a thing for many years now - modern washing machines adjust the washing cycle length by the weight of the laundry and its behavior during spin-drying, both its vibration behavior aka weight distribution (that can have multiple adjustment cycles to achieve reasonably even distribution) and how much water it loses - when no more water comes out during spinning, it will cut the cycle short to save energy.
> When I start the cycle my washing machines tells me the same duration, always, but in actuality it takes different amounts of time every time.
If it says (e.g.) 43 minutes, but sometimes it takes 40 and sometimes 49 or 53, set your timer for 60 minutes and get on with life. Your laundry sitting for 17 or 7 minutes isn't the end of the world. If your timer goes off and it's still not done, set it for another 20 and do something else.
Of all the things to fill your head with worry and annoyance with, laundry is near the bottom of the list for me.
Except when you live in a building with communal washing machines and where you need to book time for laundry, as it is common in many European cities.
My washing machine is kind enough to both indicate time to end in minutes, but also allows me to delay start so that the cycle is finished in [x] hours. It's not even that modern.
My modern dishwasher is also very kind, and displays the time to end in minutes throughout the wash. Counting down from an hour. But I don't know what kind of upbringing it had, for some reason, the sneaky bastard always adds another 25 minutes, when there is supposedly only 10 minutes left.
I guess dishwasher years are like dog years. At least it definitely behaves like a teenager at 2 years old, finishing when it wants to finish. Estimates be damned.
My home assistant does approximately this without the cloud, but it isn't magic: cloud is just 'someone else's servers' and I just host it on my own raspberry pi.
What does this have to do with “the cloud?” If you want to make a washing machine robustly notify its user that it’s done, surely a message sent over the local network or even Bluetooth is a better start. Anything involving the Internet is only useful when the user is outside the house, and there are more robust solutions to that than a server in us-east-1 that you hope the manufacturer keeps paying for.
In all seriousness, I think never has there been a better time to educate people on the fundamental philosophy of computing freedom, and I usually start with Eben Moglen and RMS's talks with people.
I don't know how much of this is generational, or how much of this is corporate sell out, or maybe even sockpuppetry for consensus cracking and other psyop techniques, but relearning the lessons of early computing (such as being able to do things offline, locally, as a core part of a functioning decentralized system), seems highly in order.
