Steve Rogerson reminisces about his old hi-fi and compares it with modern smart-home technology.

Back in the mid 1970s, I packed my bag and headed for university. In my first term, I met a guy called Nigel who introduced me to the world of hi-fi. Till then all I had was one of those record players all in one box and a little radio-cassette machine.

Now it was time for record decks, amplifiers and speakers, and in those days you used magazines such as Exchange & Mart to find different people selling the different bits second hand and somehow piece them all together. Nigel knew all this and made it a lot easier for me. We even went twenty kilometres on his motorbike to buy and collect a couple of Goodman speakers. Coming back, one was wedged between us and the other precariously balanced on the petrol tank. We were students; we did things like that.

As an aside, the deck I bought was a Garrard SP25 Mark IV. That still works and is still part of my hi-fi set up today nearly fifty years later.

Those days, we didn’t have the internet to look up how things worked; we had to figure it out ourselves. Now, the amount of gadgetry available for the home is far more complex, or is it? The technology is much more advanced but manufacturers know that if it is not easy to use and assemble then either consumers won’t accept it or they will tie down customer service hotlines trying to get it working.

I was reminded of that listening to the IMC’s post-CES panel where the presenters loved what was on show but stressed how it all had to be simple.

“Consumers need easy,” said Fred Yentz, CEO of IoT Launch. They need an out-of-the-box experience. What is key for consumer acceptance, he said, was that you turn it on and it just works.

Jim Morrish, founding partner at Transforma Insights, agreed. “The easier it is, the better,” he said. And he pointed out that if they end up calling customer support, one of the first things they often have to do is trouble-shoot the consumer’s wifi. That is hard given the fragmentation in the wifi market, making it almost impossible to guarantee a level of service.

One help for all this looks like being Matter, that smart-home standard that the big companies have signed up for that, in theory, guarantees everything will work together. Renil Paramel, CEO of Strategy of Things, described Matter as a “big step”.

He said without Matter, consumers had to decide which ecosystem to go with, whether Samsung, Apple or something else.

“Why should that be the case?” he asked. “I just want the best piece of equipment that is good for my home.”

As such, he said Matter was a “great and exciting first step”. We still don’t know what the full benefits will look like, but he said he thought the next couple of years would show what could be achieved.

As an aside, I was interested to see the news that the CSA is looking to extend Matter to cover connected health devices, which are becoming a big part of many smart-home installations.

Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of Beecham Research, said he was noticing an increased use of AI in connected healthcare devices that could analyse different bodily functions and come up with a diagnosis. This he believes will become more predominant over the next few years.

Ellen Boehm, senior vice president at Keyfactor, agreed saying the smart home was becoming a lot more than just connected appliances and lighting. The concept of smart-home technology, she said, had been around for decades but now it had evolved into something else thanks to it all having access to the internet. But she warned that it opened up the danger of being attacked. It was important that everything was designed with security in mind, she said.

One thing that has changed as a result of all this is consumers are beginning to realise the benefits of data. Nowhere is this more obvious that in smart meters where they can see how much they are spending per month, per day and, key, per application, said Fred. This is feedback they are starting to value.

Robin added that they didn’t want to know the meter reading but the implications of the reading. He criticised his utility for trying to encourage him to have a smart meter in all the wrong ways. “The individual has to want a smart meter,” he said.

Fred summed up the debate by saying the technology had to be easy to use and the consumer had to see value in it.

I was amused to hear Robin and Jim wondering if they were the only two people left in the UK who had not had a smart meter installed. I add myself to that list. I actually wanted one, ordered one, but there was a problem that took more than a year to sort, by which time I’d gone off the idea. So I still have to walk down those narrow steps to my cellar whenever the meter needs reading. But at least I can relax afterwards by putting some vinyl on my Garrard SP25 Mark IV.