HOME CONTROL REMOTE CRACKED
But he would eventually have four or five units coming in every day, from all corners of the world: remotes with cracked LCDs, broken USB ports, nonfunctioning IR emitters, busted tactile snap-dome buttons, all in need of care. The first controller Werthauer fixed was his own.
They just wanted to get their good old side-arm.” “Logitech was offering sometimes a 30 percent discount if you bought a new one, but nobody was interested in that. “People’s remotes were breaking left and right and they were complaining about the same thing,” he says.
HOME CONTROL REMOTE SOFTWARE
A former IT software developer for the New York City Department of Education, he started his business in 2010 after discovering that Logitech did not offer repairs. Still, there were signs even in the early years that Logitech wasn’t fully invested in the product line, says Werthauer. Sometimes its software was clunky or convoluted, but it was ultimately more convenient than juggling multiple bars of hard-molded plastic just to watch a dang episode of ER. But for most people, the death of Harmony is the death of the smart remote era. High-end products from Crestron and such persist, if you’ve got a thousand dollars to spare. Amazon’s Fire Cube thinks your smart remote should be your voice, which like most things that involve a lot of yelling gets old pretty quickly. A couple of companies, most notably Caavo and Sevenhugs, are still trying to make variations on the smart remote work. You can still easily find a much more basic universal remote-for cheap-at a big-box electronics store. Universal remote buying guides, to the extent anyone produces them anymore, typically comprise various tiers of Logitech devices.
HOME CONTROL REMOTE TV
A remote that you can program to execute a cascading sequence of actions-turn on the TV and the Blu-ray player and switch the input and start the movie-with the press of a single button. If anything, it’s surprising that Harmony lasted as long as it did.Īnd now that it’s gone? That’s pretty much it for the smart remote, at least in the way that Harmony embodied it: a single controller to rule them all, with its own interface and touchscreen and deep bank of devices burned into its digital brain. The writing has been on the wall, the floors, the ceiling, the sconces, you get it. Logitech hadn’t released a new Harmony device since April 2019, and CEO Bracken Darrell first suggested he might jettison the entire line six years before that. That last Friday’s announcement came as an unceremonious post in the Logitech support forums speaks to just how little the company has valued Harmony in recent years. Sent to that big charging cradle in the sky.
It would sell off whatever stock remained and keep adding to its sprawling database of supported devices. A client had sent him word that the company was giving up on the product line and that it would no longer manufacture what had become the gold standard in remote controls. “They finally did it.”įor the past decade, Werthauer has run a repair store for Logitech Harmony remotes out of his home on Long Island. “Oh, shit,” he thought as he read the email on his phone. Quin Werthauer was enjoying a cup of coffee in his kitchen when he got the news.
0 kommentar(er)
