Smart home stupidity

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OK, time for a quick rant in today's “big companies being assholes” news: Our new house came with Hive smart heating preinstalled – it was even listed as one of the features in the sales brochure. It turns out that Hive doesn't want to re-assign the network hub to a different user, and forces you into buying a whole new hub. If you buy it from them it's £80, but it seems like you can get it cheaper on Amazon through a reseller.

Tech support even had the audacity to tell me that the previous owners “forgot” to take the hub with, as a hub “can only be assigned to one account during its lifetime”. This is both bad for the environment, as I now have to throw the existing hub away, but also bad in terms of customer service. When will these companies learn?

#IoT