Smart appliances viewed as gimmicks

LAS VEGAS – If tech firms have their way, everything you use daily, from your toothbrush to your car, will one day be connected to the internet.

At this year’s International CES – the consumer tech industry’s annual Las Vegas confab – you can’t go more than a few steps without hearing someone talking about a way to connect something new to the internet. But as companies rush to create apps and embed chips in everything from your blankets to your shoes, it’s unclear whether consumers are as hot on the “smart everything” trend. After all, people probably don’t need an alert on their phone to tell them when their toast is ready – the bread popping out is a pretty good clue.

It’s one thing to have a smart appliance that saves you time or money, which is the main selling point for successful devices such as the Nest thermostat. A critical and consumer darling, analysts have estimated the Nest sells about 100 000 units per month. But other smart products have not been so quick to catch on. Companies are tight-lipped about sales figures for smart appliances, but even Whirlpool has admitted that its smart washing machine is “a little bit of a hammer looking for a nail right now”. Experts project that the market for smart appliances overall will only reach $5 billion (R40bn) in sales this year; by contrast, Whirlpool alone took in around $19bn (R150bn) in sales last year.

And that may indicate a slow market for smart devices, except for the really useful ones. Do we really want to obsessively monitor the updates from a smart diaper, an app-connected toothbrush or an internet-connected belt?

For the majority of average consumers, the answer right now is “no, thank you”. In a new survey by Nielsen’s Affinnova group, just over 40 percent of US adults said that the smart products they’d seen so far seemed like gimmicks, and 59 percent said they need real value to spend money on a smart product, not just novelty.

That presents a major challenge for companies such as Samsung, which have thrown themselves into the development of smart appliances. – Washington Post