The Thing: a thermostat that’s just plain cool

The new Nest thermostat is brilliant, in a HAL from 2001 kind of way. Not only does it adhere to commands sent from your smart phone, it also learns your patterns and adjusts to your schedule in real time, as you use it, no programming required. It knows when you usually get up, when you go to work, when you come home, when you go to bed. It can give you digital readouts of energy usage and automatically adjust to make you both comfortable and economically efficient. There’s good reason this thermostat—a normally boring appliance if ever there was one—is so cool. It was developed by Tony Fadell, the man who oversaw the iPod and iPhone divisions at Apple. A few years ago he jumped ship to tackle home temperature control, and amassed a Silicon Valley dream team of designers and thinkers who defected from Apple, Google and other tech industry powerhouses to help him do it. The results are nothing short of revolutionary. The only thing it doesn’t do is play music. Yet. $250. nest.com
Nice post TL you’re 2 years late.
sure, you may be late to the game on this, but if you’re not reading wired you probably wouldn’t know about this. annnnnyway: this thing is amazing. and will save you money. (and looks good.)
i feel like there is definitely a slow burn on the growth of this product, but eventually everyone will have something like it. everyone who has seen mine has expressed short or medium-term desire to get one, and it does have real cost savings benefits. we don’t live by schedules, but by patterns. nest builds your program around that assumption. it constantly learns, and if i’m gonna be home at a weird time, i can adjust on the way home on the iphone app.
Late or not, I do believe this was just brought to the Canadian market “officially” through Lowes. So if it wasn’t available here for the mass market before, then TL isn’t “late”.
I find their advertising somewhat ignorant, typically, since their ads show only Fahrenheit figures, not used in Canada since 1975. They want to sell here, but are too lazy to show the product showing Celsius for the Canadian market,