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Lightbulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out of 3rd-Party Bulbs With New Firmware (techdirt.com)
sandbagger writes: Purchasers of the Philips Hue 'smart' ambient lighting system are finding out that the new firmware pushed out by the manufacturer has cut off access to previously-supported lightbulbs. Philips contends that this move will help their customers. A statement from the company reads in part: "While the Philips Hue system is based on open technologies we are not able to ensure all products from other brands are tested and fully interoperable with all of our software updates. For guaranteed compatibility you need to use Philips Hue or certified Friends of Hue products."
Keurig tried this crap and it didn't work out well for them.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Phillips have a very long history if making things as difficult as possible for everyone else. Going right back to their early TVs and radios.
I don't believe that this action by Phillips is arbitrary. Some corporate genius figured that they have you hooked and that you have no options other than to bend to their will when buying light bulbs. They're wrong. I will never buy a Philips bulb again.
Does this really surprise anyone? This is one of the primary features of most IoT type setups - you dont own what you have bought, you are just using a service, and therefore of course they feel free to redefine that service as they wish.
They here of course is not limited to Phillips, but people will continue to be surprised by this.
Until we see some (haha! yeah right) legislation that makes it illegal for terms, level, or functionality of service to not be reduced or removed without agreement from BOTH parties, this is what we will have.
Consumers were enough for a while, but the hunger has increased, and you only paid once then! It is immoral for the middle class to be allowed to save, so more ways must be invented to empty there wallets weekly to fund the top (rulers) and the bottom (troublemakers who must be paid to stay in check)... Welcome to the machine.
This reminds me of the Sony PS3 case, where you could originally install Linux on it (in fact the USAF did just that to create a cheap computational cluster using over a thousand PS3s), but then Sony changed the firmware to prevent it.
In cases like these, are there any laws allowing you to return the product for a full refund? After all you may have bought it under the premise that it could do something. Then the manufacturer altered the product post-purchase to prevent it from doing those things.
If there isn't such a law, it's high time we passed one. I don't own any Phillips Hue lights, but it was on my short list (not anymore). I would imagine anyone who's bought them to use with non-Phillips bulbs will be pissed. This defeats the whole purpose of using a standardized light socket.
It's more like Tesla having control of maintenance of battery etc.
No it isn't. The battery is part of the car. The hub and the bulbs are separate devices, that are supposed to work together using a standard interface, Z-Wave. But Z-Wave is a crappy standard, with a lot of holes in the specs, so things don't work well together. Philips should be working with other manufacturers to iron out those problems, rather than fragmenting the market even more, and making Z-Wave even more worthless than it already is.
Disclaimer: I have a Z-Wave home automation hub, and I am a very dissatisfied customer. If these companies don't work together to get these problems fixed, Z-Wave is going to fail just like X-10 did. This is potentially a huge market, and they are blowing it. If Z-Wave fails, then Apple will come along with iHome and take over the market.
Because Carly destroyed a company, and Marissa is about to, apparently. Meg, OTOH, seems determined to try to repair some of the damage.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Many older dimmers need the wattage pull of incandescents to work properly. and there is nothing a bulb can do about that short of including a heater. That is probably the source of both your threshold effect and the flicker.
It is not the led bulbs that need any special magic, just engineering tradeoffs based on assumptions about operating parameters that simply do not hold up any more.