The Verge:
Honeywell is rethinking the way it tackles home automation with Lyric. It’s a $279 Wi-Fi thermostat (available today to purchase through HVAC contractors; it’ll be available in Lowe’s stores by August) that is one of the most visually appealing products in the space, as well as an obvious response to the Nest Learning thermostat. But perhaps more importantly, Lyric is also a platform. The company’s ambition is to launch a full suite of Lyric products that can all be controlled your smartphone.
Good to see competition in the space and maybe an option for those of you who don’t like Nest’s new overlords.
…like Apple, who included Honeywell Thermostats in their WWDC Keynote slides.
“Good to see competition in the space and maybe an option for those of you who don’t like Nest’s new overlords.”
To late for me. I own two of them purchased three months before Google took over.
The difference in the feature set is also nice. More compelling than Nest’s for my particular use case.
Wait, what did I miss here. Why is this blog suddenly cheering for copycat products? While it has genuine novel features, this thing was obviously, ahem, “inspired” by a Nest learning thermostat.
Not to mention the cheap shots at Nest by making fun of “learning thermostats” in the video.
They’re… basically what Samsung is to Apple.
Unsurprising, since Honeywell’s been making HA thermostats for ages now, using standard ZWave thermostat protocols.
Interesting in its way because support for this one will be different at some level.
Unlike Honeywell’s other thermostats, this is a WiFi/IP model, not ZWave, and appears to connect to a central cloud service (in a different way, perhaps, than their HomeConnect system of ZWave-to-internet/phone hub stuff, as far as I can tell. … Honeywell’s sites don’t offer a lot of detail and clarity there).
So Apple would have to do non-zero -but probably not much – work to let this thing work with HomeKit, assuming Honeywell will let it interoperate; if Honeywell wants to make the Lyric system proprietary, that’ll be problematic.
Hard to say, but a good idea for Honeywell. Their other products in the area were not so competitive now that Nest raised the design bar.
right. Total copycat. Other than UI differences, (given Honeywell has had round thermostats for a very long time, they’re hardly copying nest there), the use of geofencing so that the Lyric can automatically tell you’re home or near home without you being anywhere near it, and better ability to have the thermostat know when people are in the house even if they aren’t actually in the same room, or sitting still, (a real weakness for the nest and we have 7 in my company.)
Given that honeywell, unlike Nest, has more than one product in the home space, (nest’s now off the market smoke detector doesn’t really count), the idea of lyric as a platform, and not just a single device is a bit more realistic than Nest’s.
I’m also hoping that with Honeywell’s experience in the commercial space, dealing with lots of their thermostats will be nicer than dealing with a lot of nests. That can get remarkably painful. Oh, and Nest has some real weaknesses in the firmware update mechanism, as the day we spent having to update them the hard way can attest to.
So it’s hardly a copycat unless you’re going to seriously stretch that definition.
I will grant his assertion that there’s a lot of Nest inspiration in the change between say the Prestige 2.0 and the Lyric.
(Or the T 86 round thermostat from 1953 and the Lyric…)
But hardly Samsung-level “copy it and change just enough to probably win the lawsuit” – and everything else you say is correct.
And “learning how to make a decent UI from the competition” is the sort of “copying” I’d love to see more of, honestly.
did they cite Honeywell thermostats specifically? all i remember seeing was the Honeywell logo on the HomeKit slide, not any product specifics.
Where do you see mention of a central cloud service? The FAQ section says that you cannot access the thermostat with a PC; only the iOS or Android apps. To me, that means no web portal and therefore no cloud. Which I think is a good thing!
Ugh. I actually clicked through to the Verge site. Ugh. Please, someone remind me not to do that again.
oh absolutely there’s some conceptual copying going on. But it’s hardly a clone.
Why?
I don’t see it, I infer it from the fact of access via phones.
There is no way they’re doing a phone link DIRECT to your thermostat (it’s very difficult with firewalls and all that, and worse than the alternatives!); it’ll be to a central service they run, and that means a cloud service.
Cloud does not mean “accessible from anything, anyway”, it just means “distributed and on the internet”, remember.