June Oven's shutdown proves the cloud was never ours to keep
The smart home graveyard is getting crowded
Weber has shut down the June Oven's app and cloud services, turning the $1,495 smart oven into a dumb toaster. The company stopped making the ovens in 2022 and declined to open-source the software, citing its IP value. June now joins a growing list of connected devices that have died because their brains lived in someone else's server.
The shutdown of June Oven is just another reminder that the cloud was never ours to keep.
- cadamsdotcom
My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.
Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.
One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same ti […]
- pkthunder
I was (naively, looking back) pretty bullish on smart home devices. Automating schedules, presence detection, etc. Every time I looked to invest more into it, the marketplace felt like a minefield of e(ventual)-waste and headache.
I still struggle with it. It feels like a missed opportunity these days, but I just don’t trust companies to treat me or my devices with respect. I’ve ultimately boomeranged back to “no (cloud) smart devices.”
- kashunstva
I simply won’t install anything that doesn’t support a local API. Happy to pay for the hardware; but if your plan is to monetize it via cloud services somehow, or just assume planned obsolescence, I’m not your customer.
- emursebrian
I want appliances that are reliable and last a lifetime, I don't care about smart features. I bought a basic washing machine back in 2005. Roper brand, which is Whirlpool's value-priced line. The cycles are programmed purely mechanically using a cam timer.
Since I've owned it, all I've had to do is replace the clutch which was like a $25 part at the time. Doing it yourself (or having a repair technician take care of it), is easier and more cost-effective than hauling it out and buying a new one.
Cloud enabled features on home appliances had extra complexity and the chance your device will be bricked when the manufacturer decides to discontinue their cloud services.
- FinnLobsien
Imo, the problem with most smart kitchen devices has always been that the added benefit was never big enough to warrant the steep prices.
The June oven had computer vision to detect the food and probes to test for internal temperature and could tell the user when their food was ready.
Maybe nice for a restaurant juggling dozens of dishes in ovens, but at home, I don't need this at all because I can tell when the cheese on top is caramelized.
At $600-1500, that's a high premium for a countertop oven.