HomeTech.fm - Episode 345 - RIP Harmony

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

This week on Hometech: A quick recap of the week's news and a conversation about the death of the Logitech Harmony remote – even if Logitech doesn't want to admit it. It seems everyone in retail, distribution, and within Logitech knows the product line has been discontinued... so where's the announcement? All this and of course the pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 2nd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and the Home Tech Podcast is a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we're going to dive right into some home tech headlines, talk about some rumors. No, not Apple rumors, some other rumors. And of course, we've got to pick of the week this week. First, I do want to remind you here at the top of the show

to remind everyone, especially our patrons, about the Home Tech Talks that we're having every week. We're trying to have them every week, starting Thursday around 3 p.m. Eastern, the one true time zone. We all get together and talk about some fun things. We talked about home theaters last week. Home theaters. And some interesting conversations about kind of the gear and everything people were doing. Some process.

Talked a little bit about process, putting one together. Some gear I hadn't seen before or known about before. Kind of cool. Kind of cool to see that. So check it out. It was a cool conversation. If you're a patron, you know you know what I'm saying, don't forget about the home tech talks, but I forgot to post it on the patron feed. So I'll do that after the show. I'll post it on there. But if you're not a patron, the one way that you get to check out the home tech talks and become a part of them is to go to hometech.fm slash support. And it'll bring you to the Patreon page and any patron has access to that and can see the, the, the old episodes of the home tech talks and, uh,

and what we've got every week. You'll be in, you can sign up to join that basically a zoom webinar, but a group of us get in there and just chat every weekend. Like I said, it's been a fun, fun so far. Um, this week we're going to talk about, well, we're going to talk about something that, that that's kind of our main news headline tonight, tomorrow. I'm pretty sure we'll talk about that mostly. But it's just a good way to kind of get together and talk about news of the week or a specific topic that we talk about.

So with that, let's go ahead and jump into some home tech headlines. Oh, man. Oh, man. So, yeah, ubiquity, huh? There's a whistleblower involved in the response to the data breach suffered by Ubiquity Networks that has claimed that the incident was downplayed and could be best described as catastrophic. On January 11th, the networking equipment provider began sending out emails to customers informing them of recent security breaches. I was one of them. And I remember getting that email. They said that someone had obtained unauthorized access to Ubiquity systems hosted by a, quote,

third-party cloud provider. Remember that. We're going to put a pin in that, as they say. We're coming back to that. In which account information was stored for the UI.com web portal, a customer facing device management interface. It's where you go if you use their single sign-on services, and you go in there, you could use UI.com to buy stuff from them. So again, put a pin in that. At the time, Ubiquiti said the information, including names, email addresses, salted passwords, credentials, may have been compromised alongside home addresses and

home phone numbers of any customers that may have put that information within the portal. So no big deal, right? Change your password, should be good to go. Several months later, however, a source who participated in the response to the security breach told security expert Brian Krebs that the incident was far worse than it seemed and could be described as, quote, catastrophic. Speaking to Krebs on security after raising his concerns through both Ubiquity's whistleblower line and the European data protection authorities, the source claimed that the third-party cloud provider was a fabrication and the data breach was massively downplayed in an attempt to protect the firm's stock value.

According to the alleged responder, cybercriminals gained administrative access to Ubiquiti's AWS accounts, so their Amazon Web Services databases, by credentials stored and stolen from an employee's LastPass account, which has permitted them to gain unfettered root access to all of their AWS accounts, S3 buckets, where it's the data stores, application logs, and secrets for the single sign-on cookies, all database, all logs, all user credentials, everything. The source also took rebs that in late December, Ubiquity IT staff found a backdoor planted by the threat actors, which was removed in the first week of January.

A second backdoor, which was also allegedly discovered, led to an employee credentials being rotated again before the public announcement was made for this data breach on January 11th. Holy cow, this is absolutely insane. What a wild ride. But I guess this should be expected from Ubiquity, right? We kind of expect this to come out of this company. It's one of those companies I can genuinely say you get what you pay for. The stuff is pretty good. But any breaks, you don't cry. Like it's not the, the,

the thousand dollar ruckus access point I was talking about on the last show. It's not that, but if it breaks, I won't be as sad either. Right? Like it's disposable. I classify ubiquity as disposable it products. Like you're going to spend more time and effort trying to track down a, um, uh, an RMA for these things than you are just buy a new one, just buy a new one and swap it out and pop it in. And, and for the most part, they work. Okay. You know, as long as you don't tinker around too many of the settings, but wow, that, that culture extends all the way through the company, it seems, uh, to probably some of the worst, I don't know, like having AWS root access, you know, stored in LastPass that shouldn't be in LastPass. I'm sorry. First of all, how do you hack a LastPass

that that's, that's got to, got to have a question there. How did LastPass get hacked? Um, second of all, um, like your root AWS credentials, don't, you don't put them in a password manager. You put them like you write them down on a piece of paper and you lock them away in and store them in a safe, maybe a safety deposit box. I don't know. Like this is not if you're a multimillion dollar company like Ubiquity, not something stored in LastPass and that any random employee can have access to. I don't know. This just seems bad practices all around. I don't know. Bad situation, bad situation. Hopefully, hopefully we get some more information.

Ubiquity has not commented on this, but hopefully we get some more info from them here in the future. T-Mobile's, I gotta go to the next one. There we go. T-Mobile's streaming services won't look the same after April 29th. The carrier has announced that it's expanding its collaboration with Google across its products, including TV Vision. The original TV Vision Live, Live Plus, and Vibe services that launched late last year are winding down April 29th. So the end of next month, technically, next month.

I guess it's this month since this comes out on Friday. T-Mobile is killing those products and making YouTube TV and Philo its premium and base level TV services, respectively. Current TV Vision Live customers can get a free month of YouTube TV worth $65 and three free months of YouTube Premium, which is $12. Live is T-Mobile's $40 a month package. It offers 30 channels, which can be upgraded to live plus with additional sports channels for $10 more. Meanwhile, current Vibe customers, the tier that offers like on-demand with live programming for $10 a month can get a free month of Philo. And after that, those free months are done. T-Mobile customers continue YouTube TV and Philo subscriptions for $10 less than their original prices. So they only pay $55 a month for YouTube TV and $10 a month for Philo. Not a bad deal.

I thought this was funny. In this announcement, the company explained that it has, quote, learned a lot about the TV industry since launching TV vision and T-Mobile has concluded that it, quote, can add even more value to consumers' TV choices by partnering with the best services out there. There you go. There you go. Wow. Learned a lot. I thought that quote was quite funny. So, yeah. All right. All right. All right. I do want to wish happy birthday, Josh AI. The company celebrates being in business six years this month and has introduced a special limited edition Cobalt Blue Josh Micro. For those who don't remember Josh, AI is a voice control company. Started way back in the year 2016. And first shipped the product, it was based around the Mac Mini. It was sold kind of in aim towards the ultra

high luxury market, high-end homes, kind of priced into that as well. But a year later, in 2017, they launched the Micro, which came down in price. I mean, micro is fine. I think the micros is for what it is and what it does. I think it's extremely, extremely well priced. And then of course, the end of 2020, they came out with a nano in the core, which are there like rack mount and the nano, I think it's the, yeah, the Nano is the in-wall product, kind of like more of a new construction product. But here goes the article that we'll put in the show notes. Here it says, to date, Josh AA has signed up and trained more than 600 dealers in the U.S. and Canada.

So great job, guys. Six years. I know that Alex and friends over at Josh AA have put in a lot of work into that company, and it shows. It really does. They continue to be one of the leaders in the industry, and I'm glad we've got their talent contributing to us. Well, speaking of talent contributing, we got to talk about this, and this kind of goes

to rumors. Not Apple rumors. WBC is right around the corner. And I expect some fun new products from Apple, especially for developers like new laptops and that kind of thing to be right around the corner. But this one, we're going to talk about this a little. It's gonna be a little bit closer to home. Rumors been swirling around that Logitech will discontinue the entire Harmony remote line. And I've got a couple of points of evidence here. I've got Gavin here in the chat saying,

no, not Harmony. Yeah, I, well, I agree. I agree, Gavin. It's not so much fun to be making this announcement. So I've got an email that was sent to me from a listener, and I'm just going to remove some of the information from it to kind of make it a little less, I'm just going to remove the names from it. So it says, Dear Valued Harmony distributor, we sincerely apologize that you have probably heard this news through industry chatter

instead of directly from us or Logitech. But today we will clarify, yes, it is true that Logitech is discontinuing the Harmony brand remotes. This distributor has purchased all remaining Harmony inventory from Logitech, and at this time they'll have fulfilled most of their back orders. It says if you attempted to place a new order in the next few weeks, you'll probably get an error that says we're not accepting any new orders at this time. And it goes on to say, what does this mean for consumers? It says, Logitech has committed to continue to support all Harmony products and all Harmony customers for a minimum five years.

So that's good. It's kind of what we saw them do with the Streambox product when they disconnected that. And they say, what about defectives? Logitech will honor the two-year warranty that they currently have on their products now. So it sounds like Logitech is done with Harmony. After investigating this further today, we kind of found, I'm comfortable saying that like Harmony is pretty much 100% DOA here.

Like we're not gonna see Harmony anymore. I have no idea why Logitech hasn't made any kind of a public announcement. Just rip the Band-Aid off. I mean, this is not going to be good news. If you look back, there were articles as far back as December from, like, I'll link in the show notes, AV Gadgets, questioning if this was Logitech's next step. I even found stuff like from The Verge even further back in November, a forum post back on around the same time in December on Remote Central, which is, I don't know, an awful forum to go to.

It's just so lame. But it has over 7000 views. So people have been talking about this within the industry and speculating on this. And if you go through that forum post, Logitech says, no way, we're committed. And then you get something else from a distributor that says, nope, they're done. Or you get something from a representative from maybe a different product line in Logitech. So this is, that has confirmed, well, we know that another representative of the company has confirmed that they've moved them into what we call, what did they call it specifically? They said, uh, uh, end of life. So I don't know.

I don't know. So it sounds like the, the only thing I can think of why they haven't announced anything is they, they, they're, they wanting, they're wanting to try and sell the company off, make a little bit of money off of it, or maybe like they don't want to tank any negotiations that are out there. So I don't know. Some of you may know my feelings about Logitech Harmony, I guess. And I will admit that those feelings date back quite a bit, probably over a decade old at this point. But I'm not happy about this. This is not something I, I, I, I like to hear. I like, I like that Harmony existed. Harmony is probably the only universal remote standing that can control devices, IR, IP, Bluetooth that consumers have access to. I really can't think of another one. And I,

I keep going back to Kavo and fundamentally Kavo is a completely different product. So like, Harmony's it. I don't know, if you guys think of anything else in the show notes, like, let me know, or over in the comments, let me know. I can't, I've thought of Harmony, there's one I have actually on the shelf back there. I should have brought it out. It's, I can't even remember the company,

Seven something made it? It's a little all touchscreen thing. Um, and it didn't quite work. I mean, you, you have to have the buttons, the harmony nailed it with the buttons. So I don't know. Um, why would they do this? It's kind of like the big question, like, why is this happening now? And,, I see you say, if this was announced tomorrow, I think it's some kind of April Fool's joke. Yeah, kind of with you there. I think if you look at what Harmony has done over the past couple of years, yeah, seven hugs. Thanks, Robert. I'll try and post that. Seven hugs. They made a remote. I actually have one sitting on my shelf. I used it for a little bit for an Apple TV remote and it was OK. Not not something I would probably push for in what we call in the show here, input zero from like TV manufacturers,

from other device makers, quite frankly, like input zero is kind of the goal that everybody's been then pushing towards. And if you look at the men, like, if you look at like how devices are today, um, there's less of a need. There's not I'm not saying there's no need, but there's less of a need today than there was saving like three years ago to have. A TV system that has more than I'll say there's more than one device connected to it, like it's becoming more rare to need something like a universal remote. Now, if you, I've always said, if you have the cable box in a TV, you don't need, you can use the cable box remote.

You don't need an extra remote. If you have an Apple TV or a Roku and, and your TV, and that's it. You don't, if you just have the TV with apps on it, you don't need an universal remote. But as soon as you start adding more things in, I've, uh, every client I've ever had said, okay, you wanted to add a Blu-ray player on, or you wanted to add a, uh, Richard's pointing out, not if you have a game console, absolutely. If you have a game console, if you have to switch inputs, um, if you have to switch inputs, there's no reason to not have a universal remote. Like it makes everything so much easier. But I think what we're seeing is like largely, if you look over everything, not just like what

people in this tech industry do, but like, if you look at what the normal people do, the muggles, if we will, what they do, um, they, they're, they're, they're not, they're just hooking up like a, a TCL TV, or they're just using the apps on their LG and they're, they're plugging in the network or hooking up the wifi. They're not even plugging in network. They're just using wifi. And, and that's what is, that's what their TV experience is these days. If they want better sounds, look up a sound bar and the sound bar, if you match it with the manufacturer, most of the time works pretty well out of the box. And you can use the TV remote to control it with, it uses Bluetooth or something, you know, something on the HDMI cable or something like

ARC or something like that. It's, it's, it's a number of times I've walked, you know, walked in to people's homes that I know, and they, they've got their TV hooked up, they're running Netflix on the TV, and they've got a sound bar hooked up for the better sound. And that satisfies a lot of people. And if you don't need to buy a universal remote for that, that affects Harmony directly. And if you look across the rest of their offerings as an entire company like Logitech, you're going to see that the Harmony line was already struggling. And then you add that into the next, next to like webcams and computer peripherals, which were already having an amazing year in 2020. And put that with the less remote, less need for remotes and forecast that trend line out, you're going to start losing more and more money over time. And if you're

Logitech, you're probably not wanting to, if you're an executive at Logitech, you're going to start losing more and more money over time. And if you're Logitech, you're probably not wanting to, if you're an executive at Logitech, you're probably not wanting to have that conversation with board members or your stockholders in the near future. So less demand, mounting costs. I mean, it costs more and more to do the R&D and develop new products. And then you look at it with more profit

coming from other divisions. It makes absolutely sense that they've done this. The only thing I can't figure out is why they haven't announced this. It's only gone through the rumor mill. It's only gone through back channels and from distributors and heck from other divisions in Logitech. We're getting news that the products are all sitting over there on the chopping block. Like they're, they're EOL end of life. So I, I just don't really understand. I don't really understand why they haven't said anything about this, but, um, I guess we'll head on the way out here. Go ahead and play areas. I had this loaded up for a couple of weeks back for the home pod, but I'm going to head and play it for the harmony on the way out. It, it has been a wild 20 years of service for the brand. And you know what? Like it's been a decent remote for a lot of people for a very, very long time. There's a

lot of fans showing up here. And I think Richard here, he mentions that the Harmony Express, ill-fated Harmony Express was the nail in the coffin. It, it was a terrible product. I, I agree. I agree. Again, they, they went away from buttons, right? Um, Gavin's mentioning COVID. I don't know. I think it, I think it was contributing to that because COVID was, uh, 2020. And if you look at 2019, there were already stories popping up like these, this brand isn't doing, doing very well. Um, and I just, I had to do this research today cause I, I remembered seeing these stories, but I wasn't quite sure, um, how long ago they go back. They go back quite a bit. They go back into 2019 and some of them are even, I think the verge even had one is like, what's the point of this product? Uh, and they, it was actually a verge cast or something there. They there. They interviewed one of the, the CEC level executives and they were not quite, I don't know, like, how do I say this?

They weren't like bullish on the product either. So I don't know. It's, it's sad to say, it's sad to say this, but I think, I think Harmony is on the way out. Hopefully, the best news that we could get. Like, what's the best news that we could get? The best news is some investor buys this stuff. I mean, there's still value here. There's still a lot of value here in this product line. And the IP, the patents, I mean, there's got to be tons of R&D that just great ideas and everything

that has been floating around this company for the past 20 years. I would love to see somebody pick this up and sell it to the consumers because once this goes away, uh, you know, after the stuff runs out in the store, there's not going to be anything left for consumers. And I, Greg is, Greg is saying, let's, let's pull up and buy it. Yeah. Head on over to home tech.fm slash support. And I, Greg is, Greg is saying, let's, let's pull up and buy it. Yeah. Head on over to home tech.fm slash support. And I will, uh, I'll buy the harmony line. It'll be the home tech harmony. And, uh, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll make it happen, Greg. Let's just throw, throw, throw five bucks in and we'll make it a new, uh, a new, uh, pledge offering or something like that. So

home tech remotes, LLC. There we go. That's pretty good. I like it, Richard. So, um, yeah, Greg's pointing out there's nothing left in stores. Uh, I have seen posts, uh, all over that there, that there has been no product in distribution for a very long time. There's been no product in Canada for a long time. Um, it's not looking, it's not looking great. It's not looking great. So, well, but with that, we'll say goodbye to the Harmony and hopefully again, hopefully we don't have to say completely goodbye, but hopefully we, we, we see it, um, come around in the future here. And, uh, and we're all able to have a consumer grade remote that actually works well. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is a good remote. So that all the, all the links and topics we

discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at hometech.fm slash three 45. Don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room on Wednesday, like Greg, Richard, Gavin, uh, I think Robert is, I saw Robert in there as well earlier. Um, sometime between seven and 7 30 PM Eastern. You can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. And I got a big pick of the week. All right. So when we were talking about the harmony in the hub, the conversation about, well, what control methods do you guys like best? And I like IR. I do. Discrete IR. Let's put a pin in. Discrete IR. Discrete IR works really well. It means you have a code for power on, power off, mute on and mute off. It's very important.

Volume up and down, of course. And then you have individual controls for your input. So input one, HDMI one, HDMI two, et cetera. Individual commands for each one of those. A lot of TVs in the past, a lot of, a lot of pieces of equipment, Blu-ray players, DVD, VCRs, receiver, well, not receivers. Most of the time receivers are pretty good about this, but a lot of stuff where we're called toad devices, T-O-A-D. I have no idea what it stood for, toggle only device. I don't know. Somebody in the, somebody in the chat helped me out. But those Toad devices meant that you could only send a command for power. So think if you had like a light switch on the wall and you were blind, but somebody said, turn on the power and turn on the light and you'd reach over and you'd

flip the switch on. You'd have no way of knowing if that light was actually on or off. And there were all sorts of clever inventions in the past to detect power draw on particular products like we used to put power sensing circuits on TVs to tell if the power would come on we put signal sensing circuits they were actually built into the first control for a lot of controllers the control for media center and the home theater controller way back in the day had like a looped video in and out. So if you had one of these tow devices that you ran across, you could plug the video into it and it would sense there was video there and that would tell the control system, hey, this piece of

garbage TV is on. Well, that's IR. I do like RS-232. I'm a big RS-232 fan. Not quite a big fan of IP, but with IR, it worked really well, and it continues to work really well in the world of IP control, which can get kind of taken out with software updates and, I don't know, random things, it seems. Networking issues. If you have a network issue, your TV doesn't turn on. Why? Why do that? So I like IR control for that reason. It's kind of a separate network, and the only problem that we have with them here in Florida is a little IRs fall off. And so out of this conversation, it's a long way of me getting to the pick of the week here, came a friend of the show, Owen, out of the UK saying that he ran across a Bosch, a Bosch glue pen. And it's a wireless, I can't believe this exists, a wireless glue stick hot glue gun, basically.

And this thing is pretty crazy. It warms up in 15 seconds. So what we do is to fix the little IR buds falling off, we just stick hot glue on them and stick it on the TV and you'd never have any problems. But you'd always have to wait for the stupid hot glue gun to wake up. And it's like a $10 IR glue gun. So, uh, it just becomes a piece of your equipment that you

carry around when you're, when you're installing this stuff. Um, this thing has 15 second warmup time. It's USB chargeable and it's got like this little suction technology that'll draw the, the hot liquid back in. Uh, once you're not using. There's actually a video on this and I watched it because yes, yes, I'm that guy. I'm talking about a hot glue gun here and it's $125 hot glue gun. I don't, I don't think I'm going to buy this. I don't think I'm going to buy this. I might, I might buy this. I don't know. I really don't need this, but it really, I probably should keep the $10 really garbage hot glue gun and just live without this. But if you're in the need, if you, if you need a hot glue pen, uh, to kind of stick it in your pocket and solve problems in 15 seconds, um, this, this is your go-to. I did find

a less expensive piece also made by Bosch called gluey and you it's $60. Um, it comes in lagoon blue and cupcake pink, uh, and with all sorts of sparkly, uh, like glitter based, um, hot glue sticks. So, and I couldn't really figure out if it uses the, like the, the glue pen uses those mini sticks, which are great. Um, but the gluey uses kind of like little small nugget size versions of that. And I don't know if you can just take a normal glue stick and kind of chop it down and just stick them in the gluey gun, but really that's all you need. It probably lasts for weeks and weeks because, or months, because all you ever need is to warm it up, put a, just a drop of hot glue on the little thing and stick it on. So I don't know. Uh, there's also the Ryobi 18 volt version, which crazy enough, it works off of the Ryobi, like,

uh, whatever that 18 volt battery system that they have. And you can put just like a drill battery in the thing, or you can have a neighbor that has one of those. It's like a lawnmower and it's the same batteries that go on. It's kind of wild. So that one was $30, but I think it's a lot bigger and uses the bigger, like the bigger glue sticks. Um, I'm a big fan of just having little small pieces of equipment or small tools laying around that you can do this with. So yeah, uh, Ron, Ron mentions in the chat, I figured, uh, with the Bosch name on it, it would be expensive. Yeah, you're right. It's probably about, uh, probably about $70 more than expensive than I thought it was going to be, but you know, it's a wireless glue pen.

So what are you going to do? If you have any feedback, comments, picks of the week or ideas for the show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And I do want to say thank you to our patrons, everyone who supports the show, but also everyone who is able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to HomeTech.fm slash support to learn how you can support HomeTech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show. But every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for talks about. I mean, we're going to be limiting on Harm on harmony remotes for at least two or three weeks, right? This is, this is, this isn't going away for a while. So we're going to, we're going to be talking about this. Uh, if you, uh, if, if you have, if you want to help out, but to support the show financially, uh, if you want to help out, but can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or here on YouTube, too. We're on YouTube now.

Or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And it's what we're aiming for. It really helps people find the show and become listeners and watchers, I guess, watchers now themselves. Well, with that, guys, sad week. We've got one of the big players kind of going away. And it's not not at all what I was expecting. So to happen this week, news has been really slow.

And I'm guessing they probably want to wait till till something good happens. Maybe maybe there is a buyer. Let's just hope there is a buyer where this all goes away. But I think somebody somebody actually put a thumbs up. For some reason, I can see thumbs up a giant GIF thing. Whoever's in the live show, hit that thumbs up. It went all over my screen. I have no idea how that happened or who did it, but thank you.

But anyway, hopefully we'll have a buyer for Harmony and we'll see the brand and products continue to live on and serve their purpose in this weird changing world that we're in. So with that, guys, thank you all for joining in the live chat. And thank you for listening to the show here on the podcast. And with that, we'll talk to you next week.