Google News pointed me at the Nest thermostat this morning. In design terms, it’s an awfully sleek device, like mounting an iPod on your wall.
The motivation behind this seems to be that most people are too stupid to program a thermostat, so they set their house temperature manually, and probably don’t do it enough. In one respect, Fadell has a point, programmable thermostats are extremely crude in their interface. I really don’t enjoy messing with mine. It’s not that it’s particularly hard, it’s that it’s clumsy and remarkably error-prone for such a simple task. Set time, set temperature, 4 times for each day of the schedule, and no “back” button so if you make a mistake, you have to go through the cycle again from the start. Most often with me it’s that the thermostat isn’t being responsive to button presses, and I end up skipping a temperature setting.
Still, it’s a very simple task, even if annoying, and you usually only have to do it once. The Nest thermometer seems aimed at the 12 o’clock flashers of the world, the people who can’t can’t figure out how to set the clocks on their microwaves. This is a device you use like a manual thermostat, setting the temperature by twisting the dial, and it figures out your schedule from that. Provided your conscientious enough to turn your thermostat down at night in the first place, of course.
It’s a seriously high-tech thermostat. That bit in the center is a high resolution color LCD screen, and it has a setup menu that you access with an Classic iPod like turn-and-click interface. It has WiFi and internet connectivity, so you can mess with it from anywhere you have a web browser, and it has an iPhone app. It has what appears to be an infinite number of temperature set points, watching the video showing the scheduling menu. If you’re not an idiot, you can create a schedule yourself, and the scheduling interface is so much better than a regular thermostat it’s like the difference between a GUI and a command line interface.
To my eye, it has two major design flaws. The first is the much-touted “auto away” feature, where a motion sensor built into the thermostat will automatically switch to “away” temperatures if it hasn’t seen you for a while. That’s at least half the issue when setting thermostat schedules right there (the other half being sleep times), and it sounds great until you think about it for more than about 30 seconds. Very, very few people live in just one room of a house. I don’t care what room it is, there are going to be times when you’re not in there for hours at a time. To make this idea work, the Nest would need 2-3 remote sensors for every temperature zone, and it doesn’t. I know I’d turn this feature off right away, because my desk is simply not visible from my office thermostat location.
The second is one that the Nest shares with most thermostats, it has separate “heating” and “cooling” modes. It’s a friggin’ computer, and I still have to flip that stupid switch for it? Every fall around here the climate likes to fake me out, getting chilly enough to justify switching my thermostats (I have 3 zones) to “heat,” and then the next day is a heat wave that pushes my attic office above 80 degrees. This is understandable with regular thermostats that aren’t much smarter than mechanical switches, but the Nest web page talks about periodic software updates for the device.
I also think Fadell’s head is in a weird place. In this video interview, he starts by spending a couple of minutes talking about about design aesthetics before talking about actual functionality.