The Vergecast - Version History: Harmony remote

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

The Harmony Universal Remote was supposed to be the only controller you needed for all the devices in your life. So what happened? David Pierce is joined by The Verge’s Nilay Patel and John Higgins, as well as Nest co-founder (and current Harmony user) Matt Rogers, to follow the Harmony's timeline from its origins as the "Easy Zapper," through Logitech's acquisition, all the way to its slow death at the hands of smart TVs. And their vastly inferior remotes. If you like the show, ⁠⁠follow the Version History audio podcast feed⁠⁠ to get every new episode. Version History is also on video! Check us out on YouTube. ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[e-mail]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of IRBlasters. I'm your friend David Pierce, and our regular show is off today, but we want to play you an episode from the new season of version history. Virgin history, if you don't know, is our show about old technology. We tell the story of some of the most important products in tech history. On this episode, it's one of our favorites. It's the Harmony Remote, the Universal Remote that promised to give you one thing to control everything. It's me, Nilai Patel, the Veri.

George is John Higgins and Matt Rogers, the former co-founder of Nest. Nest, by the way, another episode we're doing this season, but Matt demanded to talk about harmony. It's a really fun episode. I think you'll enjoy it. Here it is. Around the turn of the century, two guys in Canada had an idea that maybe they could build a product that could simultaneously control your TV, your home theater, your VCR, your DVD player, and everything else in your living room. And that maybe if they could get that product into your living room, all that would be just the beginning. From the Virgin Vox Media, this is version history, a show about the best and worst and

strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today, it's time for the story of the Harmony Remote. Support for the show comes from Service Now. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do.

So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Support for this show comes from Vetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance.

Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save. Right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Fetchpet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000.

And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save.

All right, we're back. It is time for what I think is going to be a strangely heated conversation about TV remotes. Joining me in the studio, Neelai Patel. Hello. How many Harmony remotes would you say you've owned and used over the years? Over half a dozen.

Which is a lot. I mean, a lot. The category lasted maybe 10 years and I had over six is what I'm going to say. Also here, John Higgins, our TV and audio reviewer. You have as long a history with Harmony stuff as just about anybody, it seems like.

Harmony remotes were one of the first things that I reviewed back 20 plus years ago when I was at Home Theater Magazine. Also, joining us remotely, Matt Rogers, CEO of Mill, the co-founder of Nest back in the day, who I will just say fairly straightforwardly demanded to be on this episode. Matt, welcome on the show. I have a lot of opinions about this. Yeah. Tell us briefly about your Harmony history. I had no choice.

There's nothing else out there like this. And even though this product has been gone for a long time, still a user. That's amazing. That is. Nest had a lot of Logitech people at it, from what I recall. Many. Was that you saying I got to get some of this harmony juice at Nest? Yeah, look, and their product marketing team, I thought, was one of the best in the business.

And this was kind of the golden age of Logitech, 2000s, early 2010s. Also in studio with us, we have, I think, three different Harmony remotes, which go from a few buttons and a screen on the bottom, which is weird, to a lot of buttons and a screen on the top, which is more or less the harmony story, as we're about to get to. into. So let's dive in here because there's actually a fair amount of history to get into, and then we are just going to litigate the best Harmony Remote model for one to seven hours. So I want to go back to 1999, which is where our story starts. And actually, Neely, I need you to do just a tiny bit of level setting for us. For people who were not alive or paying attention or buying home theater gear in 1999. All of us could do this, I will say. But you, I'm betting, of the four of us, may have owned the most home theater gear at this time. Like if I just had a guess,

Yeah. So a thing that was happening right around now is there's this explosion of stuff in your living room that you might be using and needing to control in some way. Can you just paint us a picture of what that ecosystem started to look like in your living room right around this time? Yeah, you know how now if you have kids and they're into sports, you buy a lot of sports care? My parents had me. So in our living room, we had a giant Toshiba rear projection TV that was connected to at that time cutting edge Dolby Prologic 2 receiver. So these are immediately two things you need to control. That thing had four inputs that mattered.

So there was the VHS player, which was still very relevant at that time, the DVD player, the CD player, and of course, the tape deck. The only thing that we cut out in that period of time was we set aside the record player, which has now made a ferocious comeback. So you just had this proliferation of devices. all of them came with their own IR remotes, and the individual manufacturers all had their own weird proprietary control systems. So we were a pioneer family, so most of our stuff was pioneer, and you could plug headphone cable in between the receiver and the CD player, and that would let you use the receiver's remote to control the CD player.

Good Lord. This was a total nightmare. Yeah. And so you just had the coffee table with six remotes on it, because sometimes what you wanted was to play. a CD and sometimes what you wanted was to play a VHS and sometimes what you wanted was to play a tape.

And you had to switch inputs on the receiver. You had to tell the TV what thing was going to happen because often your game console is plugged directly in the TV and then you had to control playback on whatever device and you're just now you're five remotes. And always had the volume with the receiver. You couldn't do that from any of us.

And so that remote just was there for one function alone to control the volume. And then all of your transport controls, your playback controls, were usually somewhere else. And then on top of it, if your life was like a pure kind of hell, you also had a cable box or a satellite box. And that remote was just its own kind of nightmare at all times. And none of this stuff could talk to each other in any meaningful way.

Matt, you've been nodding along. Does this all feel about right to you? Can you best in Eli's chaos? It was an awful time. And what would happen is inevitably one of the batteries would have been taken out of one of the remotes. Of which, you know, like, teenage Matt would have to say, like, why is nothing working? It was usually someone left the batteries out. It was not a good time.

The reason I wanted to do this at front is because, like, this is such an obvious problem with an obvious solution that everybody understands to be a better idea. What if I just had one remote to control everything? So this is, this starts to happen. There had been this big explosion in this market in the 1980s when Sony won a lawsuit about the VCR. People start wanting to record and watch stuff in different ways. So this is just, like, exploding. Steve Wozniak at one point leaves Apple to go found a company doing a universal remote. Phillips was making remotes.

Harmon Cardin was making remotes. This was a thing that was out there. But then these two guys named Glenn Harris and Justin Henry decide that they want to make their own. They get super annoyed at all these remotes and decide to make something better. And they create a company. And this is the first product ends up with this name. And this is a true test of your harmony knowledge. It was not called the harmony.

Do any of you remember what it was called? This is the easy zapper? It is something like that. Oh, my gosh. Good work. Throwback. So they start a company called Easy Zapper, and this is the thing that they want to do. They eventually changed their company name to intrigue technologies, which I would argue

was vastly worse than Easy Zapper. That's a real toss-up. So they decide to start building a remote. And actually, in a certain way, this is an easy problem, and in a certain way, this is a very hard problem. Because all the stuff you just described, Neli, is like fundamentally uncomplicated technology. Everything about this that makes people think it's an easy problem is why it's a hard problem. Explain it is a super hard problem. Like, remember, no one publishes their specs.

No one publishes their specs. All of them use different IR codes. The IR codes conflict. And Matt, I'm curious if this is your read on it as the actual technologist here. There's no feedback loop to validate that you've done the right thing except the dumb person sitting there holding the remote who has no idea what's going on. Yeah, this is wild. Like, this is an era before Bluetooth. Yeah, for the kids at home, back in the day, us grandparents, the way we,

are devices you would communicate is they would blast light to each other, but light you could not see. And it was a very bad technology. Very slow. It was all we had. Very unreliable. Yeah. There is a little light bulb, like a little LED at the tip of the remote, and you would push a button and it would flash in a sequence that would indicate volume up. It's in all these remotes today. There's just more Bluetooth in the world, but you would hold the two remotes and the whatever universal remote, including the harmonies, had a sensor in them. So the fallback, if the codes online didn't work was you would put it in like a learn mode and you would hold volume up on your remote and it would watch the flashes and learn the code for volume up.

So it's essentially just like doing Morse code with light in order to do you communicate. To your point on like the devices didn't know if it worked or not, there was no like check codes. There was no acknowledgement. It was just like sending your Morse code out into the ether and hope we got there. So everything about it that makes it seem easy, I just have to clone this set of IR codes is actually why it's impossibly hard and everyone who's ever tried it has failed in some kind of comical disaster.

Yes. So that's actually a perfect description of the problem that they set out to solve. And one of the biggest problems is, like, how do we know what's happening with any of your devices? And this ends up being like a foundational piece of the technology that they build is they actually patent a system that allows the remote to store information about the state of your other devices. So it rather than just...

Does it? Again, does it work? Who knows? I think what I'm... Did they get a patent for it? Hell yeah. I think what I can preview for the audience here is Matt and I feel very differently about the Harmony remotes. I can't tell you how many hours have been spent on getting this thing, right?

Even like the timing is like, you know, adding delay between commands. It's a lot. It's tough. So they set out, there's also this thing happening, right? There's a, the personal computer revolution is happening. Lots of people are getting computers. Lots of people are getting access to the. internet. So they decide, like, oh, one way we can solve a whole bunch of this problem is to

take the systems for controlling all these different devices and rather than make you program each individual one yourself or just press a button and hope and pray something good happens, we can let you sort of build these systems for yourself. And I just want to read you a line. This is from a Washington Post story at the time. And I want to point out this is describing a good idea that works well. This is how they describe it. Instead of adding control codes for new gear through sequential button pushing on the remote. You can use a more or less friendly computer interface, then transfer the new smarts to the remote with a serial cable.

These come with control codes stored on board so you don't need a computer to start using them. Once you're done downloading or editing new control codes, you can then rearrange the on screen buttons on these remotes backlighted, touch-sensitive PDA style displays. This is the absolute state-of-the-art remote technology. Simple. Yeah.

Totally simple. They, I think, knew, it seems like at the very beginning that they're building like an absolute power user system here. Right? Like, this is not for the faint of heart. Right. And at this time, John, you were like, you were in this space early on. There were not like a bunch of other easy takes at this. There doesn't seem to have been a way to do this that was easy. No, none of them were easy.

Yeah. All of them were designed for people that at least thought they knew what they were doing. Yeah. So again, this is the team calls it smart state technology. Perfect. And again, did it work? Who's to say? But boy, was it a thing that they patented and made a big deal out of. We have one of the first remotes that they made, I think not the first one, but one of the first ones here in the studio with us. And it is just one of the most bizarre remotes you will ever see it. Because there is a screen on the bottom of it. This is the most upside down remote I've ever seen about it.

I walked into the studio and confidently said, that's upside down. And it absolutely is. Sure is it. So the screen is at the bottom. Then there's the numpad zone, which has arrows around the eight, which makes no sense because the eight itself is not directional. the buttons under the arrows. Like the five has a up arrow under it, but the five is up.

That makes no sense. Then you've got a button labeled zap. Unclear what that does. Oh, I got answers for that one. Then you've got mute recall. Then you got your transport controls at the top. Again, the play button has directional arrows around it, but it's not directional.

So this makes no sense. And at the very top you have the red IR window. Any human being would look at this and think it was upside down. Even the way the mold lines and the plastic are oriented make you think it's upside down. Like, there's no way this thing isn't upside down. It's more comfortable.

They took an existing remote, and they just printed all the buttons upside down. It naturally puts your hand further forward, which means you can't get to the number pad. It's very good. This one we have is not the very first one. I can show you a picture of the very first one, which is an incredibly simplified version of the same thing. So you can see it has two easy Zapper logos on it, which I appreciate. by the time they started selling them, they were calling them Harmony remotes. They seemed to really chicken out on Easy Zapper as a name progressively over time as a company.

But they left the Zap button. But they did. So would you like to talk about Zaps? I would love to talk about Zaps. So one of the things that this remote could do, and I want to underscore the ambition behind Harmony and Easy Zapper and all of the things that this was supposed to be. This was not just supposed to be a universal remote for all of your stuff. This had such enormous dreams for what it might be.

So the very first thing it could do is it had this screen down at the bottom, and when you connected it to the internet, by which they meant literally plug it into a wire into your PC, into your PC. It could download program listings for your TV onto the four-line screen on the remote. And you could actually scroll through the TV guide on your remote, press something and have it basically deep link you right to the thing that you wanted to watch. So it was like a little tiny TV guide on your remote. And that was what it was called zapping programs. But again, this is only the very beginning. They had this idea. And remember, this is like 1999, 2000, 2001.

They had this idea that maybe if you're watching a cooking show, you should be able to press a button on your remote and immediately be taken to a web page containing the recipe for the thing that they're making. Or maybe you should be able to. Oh, boy. This is the area of TiVo, right? Like, I think we all forget about what was going on in the world this time. This was a really important feature. Like, you know, we had just started having the ability to, like, record shows at our houses. Like, everything was appointment viewing back in the day.

Web TV was everywhere. Yeah, this is a different era. Yeah. Well, this is like, there is this term, the digital living room that is such a thing at this moment and kind of forever. Like, everyone has always tried to figure out how do we put technology in your hands while you sit on your couch? How do we access you while you're watching TV is like a huge. huge. Everybody understands how much money there is it. This becomes a big part of the Alexa pitch. You can go watch a show on Amazon now, and all it does is give you links to buy the

things in the show. This is what Google ends up to with Google TV. There is this idea that if we can just put an internet connected device within reach while you sit on your couch, something will happen. No, it's not something. We all know what it is now. We'll make tons of money. You'll buy something. Right. By the way, this idea that there will be these feedback loops to your TV, it's, I mean, It's going to come up over and over again in this story. You're watching something on TV and you want to close the loop and buy the shirt that Rachel is wearing on friends. How are we going to close that loop? How are we going to detect that shirt and then give you a buy button?

And the answer to the time, as Matt is pointing out, is like, we're going to put a computer on the TV and it's going to run MSN. And it's like, why are you doing that? Like, don't do that. And the whole industry chased this dream forever. and on the other end is you're going to hold a device in your hand that has no idea what's going on on the TV. And that's going to control everything. And you can see, even to this day, the feedback loops are not perfectly closed. Like, it is the dream of the industry.

I mean, this is also a moment in time before Facebook, before YouTube, where most of advertising dollars were putting things on TV. Like TV advertising was all of the money in marketing. So you think about like, you know, in the spirit of. building startups, like, chasing where the money is. Like, that is where the money was then. Yeah. And again, this is like the early internet days when there's a real sort of internet one point O belief that maybe one of the most important computers you own will be

your television. Like you might have a computer on your desk or whatever, but maybe you'll come home and you'll do a computer on your TV. That didn't pan out. But this is the thing they're trying to do. And the easy zapper idea is maybe we can be the literal remote for that, that this can be the way that you watch television and the way that you buy things. So even in their press release launching this thing, and again, this is what zapping is,

you're zapping things to and from the internet, which I think is a cool phrase that we should bring back. It says, it says with this feature zaps, you can buy a music video, link to new sports equipment, or lift a recipe from your favorite cooking show. You will never have to do a web search for something you saw on TV again. Well, then. What an idea. So again, this is like, they very much are thinking.

about this as more than just a way to control all of your stuff, but they have to control all of your stuff in order for this to work. Like, Matt, you have a long history in smart home stuff. And I just want to know your read on this as a smart home guy. Because, like, in a very real way, this is not a TV product. This is a smart home product. Yeah, it really is. 25 years ago.

Is there something to this? Oh, absolutely. Again, also, I mean, this is an era in history where the other side of kind of smart home was extremely high-end custom integration, you know, wealthy people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have these control boxes that allowed them to change the channel and have all their systems work with one remote. The era of Crestron, for example. Yeah.

You know, custom integrators. So this idea that everybody could get that technology and control all of their home theater with one thing is, I mean, it's kind of a bold statement at the time. John, do you remember in these early days, like you were covering this stuff from the TV side? Did this actually have legs at the time, did you think? Yeah, absolutely. Because it was, as Matt just said, they were trying to cater to the people that wanted the control for the restaurant systems and have them be more accessible in their homes that they could do. They didn't have to pay somebody to come in and set up their TV, their curtains, their lighting.

I just want to take a pause here and point out that the smart home integrator market is bigger and more lucrative than ever because this problem is not been sold. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I tried, I tried. I'm just saying like Crestron didn't go anywhere. They just got bigger. So yeah. So in addition to all of this, it goes about trying to find smart ways to control all of the stuff in your house.

And it winds up with this system that sort of fails gracefully by design, but I think in most practical cases fails sort of spectacularly, which is that on the one hand, you can go and download the various control systems for various devices. And so somebody would do the learn mode thing and say, like, this is how you control this Toshiba receiver. They would upload it to the Harmony website. And then you could go and download it. And then you would already have all the controls baked into your remote. So it ends up being this sort of crowdsourced problem, which as far as I understand, winds up being really good and useful. Because this is like how the Harmony Remote wound up having more compatibility than anything else. Because my assumption would be, I didn't have nearly as much cool home theater equipment as you guys did.

But in those days, if you have a remote that solves half of your living room problem, but not the other half, you've kind of solved no problems. Yeah, yeah. Like if I'm going from six remotes to four, I've spent a bunch of money for no reason. And this seems to be one of the main issues with a lot of the universal remotes at the time, right? Yeah, absolutely. So the harmony gets way ahead of this by basically letting people solve this problem for themselves and share it with each other, which I think is very cool. And then it comes down to, I would say, smartly trying to guess what you're doing. When you press the volume button, for instance, it would actually try to guess based on what you had done recently, which device you might be trying to control.

This is where this all falls apart. Yes. And then from there, it just goes straight down to you just point out of things in hope. But what I wonder is, like, was this just a completely unsolvable problem in that sense? Like, how could you have done this better at the time? There's some stuff you know. So, as John pointed out, you almost always want volume to happen on the receiver. So they were just hard map the volume buttons to the receiver, and that stuff.

that. Then there's, as the product line got more and more and more developed over time, they developed what can only be described as macros. So you would push, watch TV, and it would just issue sequences of IR commands. And as Matt was saying, like, it would adjust the timing. So it's like you turn on the receiver and then the receiver would take a second to boot up. And then at the right instant, it would send the input code to the receiver. If you send it too early or too late, you'd miss the window because the receiver is on to whatever next thing it was doing. And then you also got to turn the TV on and make sure this happens. And like, watch a movie. If you just imagine yourself as a person doing it with six remotes, you're going to pick up the

receiver remote, turn on the power, the TV remote turn on the power, the DVD, right, you're going to do all that stuff with your hands. The harmony is like, that's a sequence we can automate. It's a macro. We'll just issue all those commands with like little time delays to make sure it works. The problem is we've been pointing out over and over again is it has no idea if any of these things happened. So then you end up at this remote that's perfectly programmed for maybe nothing being in the right state. Yeah, it was right maybe 80% of the time. It was like, you know, you'd spend all this time to program it and get it right. And then, you know, obviously these are a lot of analog systems too. So timing may be variable timing changes or, and then you have to reprogram it all over

again. I used to tell my wife this all time. She's like, how come the TV's not turning on? I'm like, hit the off button. It'll all go off and start over again. Start over again. It was the key move. And the weird dynamic here, one, is the software was horrible. Particularly if you were a Mac user, the Logitex software to program these remotes, was just garbage. I believe it was made in, like, Macromedia Director. Like, it wasn't even like a Mac app. It was like a fake app that would go talk to the web in, like, weird ways and, like, totally crap.

Like, none of this was good. Like, eventually Steve Jobs was like, I'm not going to have flash on the iPhone. And I think it's because he tried to program a harmony of an remote. Like, it was that level of that, right? So you'd end up in this weird, and it was wizard-based. So even if, like, you're like, I know what to fix. I just need to go fix it. It'd be like, it looks like you're trying to program your remote.

And you're like, I hate you. Like, get out of my way. I just need to change this one button. So this is a nightmare. And then there's this huge, boy, do I have a lot of feelings with this around. Then there's this huge gap in what's actually happening here, which is the biggest nerd in the family has a toy. And they have bought the toy and they've fought through macro media director to program

the toy. And then when they're done screwing with a toy, everyone else in the house is compelled to use the toy. And the toy is brittle in ways that delight the nerd and absolutely frustrate everyone else. And no one has just the straight up honesty to admit that they have become an underpaid systems administrator for a piece of junk. They're like, I can fix it. And like, you're just off to the races because the primary user of all that automation does not care about any of this. Right. Like for one second.

And you, as the big nerd, are totally fine dealing with six remotes. Right. This is like the famous babysitter test, right? Like, can a person who has no experience with your system come and sit down and use it? And I feel like in theory, universal remotes are supposed to be the solution to that problem, right? Instead of a tray of remotes in front of you, here's the one that you use for everything. I cannot believe how many times the babysitter would be texting me saying, I can't figure out to him. This was my house, literally.

Yeah. So, Matt, you have like, you're still using the thing. You have much for a positive view of this. Give me the pitch. There's literally no choice. This is the problem. It's like literally no other option because I refuse to give Crestron $100,000 to fix this problem. And we'll get to it.

Like the ebbs and flows of the Harmony business over the years, like there's still nothing else like it out there. So actually, this is a good moment. Let's take a quick break. And then we're going to get into it. And then the fate of Harmony changes very quickly. We're going to get into that. We'll be right back. The report for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance.

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All right, we're back. The Harmony Ships in 2001, it costs $299 Canadian dollars, $199 U.S. dollars, which I would argue is a pretty solid price as Universal Remotes go. It held that price for a little while. It did for a long time. Yeah. And then in 2004, Logitech buys intrigue technologies, nay, easy zapper, for $29 million in cash plus performance-based bonuses. Pretty good deal. Yeah.

And in this deal, Logitech is very clear that it wants the full vision of the thing. It's not just a controller for your television. They want this digital living room thing. They want the big ideas about what they're up to. And, Neil, I have a sentence that is going to make you feel so many feelings. And I would like everyone to react to this sentence. This is from Garino DeLuca, who was the Logitex CEO at the time. He said, and I quote, we see the remote control as the mouse of the digital house.

I believe he said that earnestly and with a straight face. John, how does that make you feel? I don't know, a little dirty, maybe? Never rhyme in like, yeah. It's just like, what is this? Oh, gosh. The mouse of the digital house. Grino DeLuca, he has like a bunch of these.

Like, he's a character in the industry at this time. Well, very much so. And Logitech is also kind of on top of the world. This company is making very good stuff. The other phrase they use a lot is they like last inch devices. They make a lot of mice and keyboards and it's like they talk about, you know, last mile with delivery stuff. He's all about the last inch.

We used to call those accessories when we were done. What fun is that? That's great. Maybe my computer is an accessory to my keyboard, Matt. The mouse for your digital house really, really misses. on where the computer of your digital house will be. Uh-huh. This is a vision that's like,

you're up right, computer somewhere. So this is a fascinating thing because this is 2004, right? So this is before the iPhone. This is before smartphones even are ubiquitous everywhere. But like we're deep in like the Blackberry age by now. We're doing phones with internet access. It's already clear to some people who are paying attention that we are starting to move into a new kind of device with a new kind of powers.

and they're here being like, it's the remote control. And so I just want to pause at this moment and ask in 2004, should Logitech have bought this company for this giant vision of what it was going to do for the home? Or was it already barking up the wrong tree? I think they got sold the dream. Yeah, I think, look again, knowing how the accessory business works. Like you sell these very high margin accessories. they're probably, you know, 50, 60% margin on these things. But they were chasing this dream of, you know, can we be a services business?

Can we be an advertising business? You know, TiVo had gone public a few years earlier. Web TV got bought by Microsoft for a gazillion dollars. So they're probably looking at that as, hey, like, we need to get a piece of that market, too. Yeah. And owning and controlling the user interface is always where the power is, right? Yeah. So all those things came with remotes, but if you're like, my remote will have a screen on it

and control all that stuff because you can't stop me because it's all I are. Sure. You can get there. Then there's whatever other automations that you might wish to link to your harmony. And you're like, we're going to sell this out-of-the-box control system to consumers, and that's going to be a big market. That said, if you are looking at the things people are buying, the computerized their house at that time, man, you run right into the fact that the TiVo remote is really good. Right. Like, it is just a really good remote that people love.

It's not the best-selling DVR, but that's the high watermark for remotes. Right. It was far more ergonomic than any of these harmonies ever turned out to be. Then you run into the fact that actually a real problem is the cable company is shipping universal remotes with all their cable boxes because they know that their customers, they just need the TV to turn on and the volume to go up and down. And they can solve that problem with a very cheap universal remote that everyone remembers like plastic gray bubble remote. This is your real competition. You got to do better than that. It is surprisingly hard to do better than free plastic bubble remote for 90% of people.

The one that comes with my cable box is pretty much good. And that thing defeated TiVo. Like, we did the TiVo episode and that thing just defeated TiVo. Yeah. So I think they bought into a vision. There's certainly a market. I think what they truly missed is that eventually the computer would end up inside the TV. Right?

And then the TV's remote would do everything. And because the interface is actually going to be on the television. And I don't think anybody saw that happening at the rate at which it happened. But the TV going from dumb to smart. the second that happened, the harmony was done. John, are there any glimmers of this happening in the TV industry yet? Like, at this moment, what's going on in TV world? 2004?

No, I mean, we're still staunchly dumb TV area. And the remotes that are coming with those TVs, for the most part, aren't behaving well with others. So most people still have this real need? Yeah, I believe so. Okay. At that point, there was still the dream. of wanting to be able to control everything at once with one remote. You definitely two boxes.

You had a cable box and some sort of VHS player or DVD player. Like at the very least, you had three things, right? Like that was a pretty standard setup for most people. One of the fascinating personal revelations of preparing for this episode has been that my family had just like a giant-ass CRT TV with rabbit ears and nothing else for way longer than is like cool or appropriate. We got cable for the first time in 2007 and it was like life-changing. Yeah, look, this was a, it was, again, it was a real problem back then, especially if you had game consoles, stereo, these things really made, you know, made this so complicated.

But, you know, the core problem here is, like, there's not a real business selling remotes. I think this is why they had to sell the dream. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we could do more than just be a remote company because the remote business is not a good business. Yeah, no, I think that's right. So, but Logitechus is company, and I would say pretty immediately we enter what you would call the golden age of the Harmony Remote. This remote in front of us, the Harmony 880, comes out in 2005, a year later. They just turn around and ship this thing.

And there are people who would argue this is the best Harmony Remote ever. This is, I would say, the canonical Harmony Remote. Yeah, I agree. This is the one most people remember as the Harmony Remote. They've oriented it correctly. The screen is at the top. It is reasonably ergonomic. It's got the, like, trigger fingers at the bottom here.

So you can really zap with abandon. Great D-pad. and then the screen here shows macros and the control buttons are on the side. So you're like watch TV and you push this button and like things happen. Yeah, this is I think when

pretty much every Harmony Remote after this looks like this in some sort of big structural way. And this just becomes the look of harmony remotes. This also... By the way, the fundamental error of this remote as cool as it is, just try to glance to identify

where the volume buttons are. I found him. Yeah. That took a long time. They're hidden on the side is part of like a design element and the plus button is in a monumentally stupid decision

smaller than the minus button. I could not tell you why that is. It's also really hard to use it the dark. Yeah, if you're like watching a movie, like it's, it was hard. Yeah, it was really, yeah, they didn't, they didn't nail that. But it did come with this killer charging dock,

which is very cool. So from here, the story sort of speeds ahead until about 2013 when stuff starts to get wacky. But I would just like to give all of you an opportunity. This is now is the moment that if you have deep and abiding love for a particular harmony remote, I would like you to profess it right now before the whole thing starts to fall apart. And it does so very, very, very, very, very quickly. John, now is your time.

Harmony 1. Tell me. It felt great in my hand. Actually, I'm going to pause for a minute because I feel. Getting emotional. Well, I definitely have some rose-collar. glasses on. Okay. Because as I'm starting to think about the touch screen where it broke it up, there were like four buttons you could fit on each screen. I was about to say it's great. You could

hit your watch TV or play games. It was very inaccurate in my experience. It was resistive, right? A little bit. And I can't say the number of times that I went to hit, maybe it's the size of my hands. I went to hit watch TV and play games was what my thumb hit instead. I remember a lot of those touch screens in general when it was like you actually have to press a half inch to the right of the thing that you're trying to press because that's the way the sensors work. The Harmony One is the other one that when we told people are doing this episode. The two that we got the most feedback on were the 880, which a lot of people had for a very long time and had really great feelings about and the Harmony One, which a bunch of people sent me like borderline rude email.

about how much they loved the Harmony One. Like, that thing just has a special place in people's technological histories. I still have friends, other reviewers, TV reviewers, that are still using their Harmony Ones or lament the fact that they don't have their Harmony Ones anymore. I mean, I think I have my Harmony One somewhere. Wow. I found my Harmony Hub, which was basically your IR Hub that you had, which was awful. because it would always, for whatever reason, it would move.

Right, and then I couldn't see your stereo anymore. Yeah, it was the worst. It would be the purpose. Absolutely worse. So then you're getting up off your couch to move. You're not getting up off your couch to actually use your devices. You're getting up to move the Harmony Hub a little further forward to then go sit back down on your couch and not have your remote work properly. Okay, so I looked it up.

The Harmony One, indeed, had a 2.2-inch resistive touch. which meant that when you pushed it, the top layer of the screen had to contact, this is why it was inaccurate. Right. And so this was at the time, there was a big fight in smartphone world about capacitive multi-touch screens like they had on the iPhone and resistive screens, which in particular, Nokia insisted was better for Finland because it was cold outside and people wore gloves. And I can't tell you, and Gadget as gadget bloggers, just the religious wars we would have in our. comments about resistive versus capacitive touchscreens and we would just be like no the resistive one scuts because

they're always inaccurate. I think it's safe to say that that argument was well in one by capacitive touchscreen. Yeah I don't think that was... Matt are you still seeing a lot of resistive touch screens out there in your line of work? Not a decade. They're gone. Yeah, yeah. And then the other piece the IR Hub, it's just like a doom technology. Like I can't... So much

of Harmony is like a huge bet on IR all the way to we need to make a breakout box and communicate with it. I think the Harmony one is like Bluetooth to the breakup. Like, this made no sense. Yeah. Well, and it got wackier and wackier over time because, like, this is also a phase of unbelievable, like, technological expansion, right? Yeah. Smartphones come out. We start doing some sort of proto-smart home things. Matt, you're working on Nest and working with things like Zigby and Z Wave and working on thread. Logitec eventually

tries to incorporate all of this into, in many cases, very old remotes, and they do it by just selling you more and more gear. Yep. So they have extenders. They have a hub that you can put stuff in. They are like I think in a sort of earnest and good way, desperately trying to continue to be a universal remote when the whole idea of a universal remote is just exploding in front of their faces. Yeah, it's turning into a smartphone. Yeah. So my favorite remote, I'll just say, because I think Matt's holding it, is the 900, which is the, in my view, the platonic ideal of the harmony line.

You could see why I use it for so many years. Like, I got my Android TV macro. I got my Apple TV macro. my Sonos macro, my Blu-ray macro, my mini-PC macro. You couldn't do this any other way. You finally achieved convergence. You put a TV under your PC under your TV. In this one, if I have my timing correct, this one comes out well into the we should be doing more stuff on screens era.

Like that remote you're holding is much more screen than some of the older Harmony. Yeah, they did a, it even has some macros for like turning the lights on and off. And this is around the era where Harmony was actually a. works with Nest Partner. Like they... Oh, nice. They wanted to go all the way. Yeah.

Yeah. They really did. And I think ran into the question of, do we need a universal remote for anything? And I want to come back to that question. But I also want to point out, to two, to Harmony's credit, all of this is very complicated. There's a lot going on. The things don't work all the time. And yet they are by a country mile, the best product for this thing for a very long time.

Well, we have to remember we're talking about the one. and the 900. This is the top of the range. The Harmony 700s and the 600s, which are just straightforward, IR-based universal remotes that don't even have PC features. They're the sellers. Yes. And even those, like, I went back and was reading old, like, wire cutter recommendations of them.

And it's literally just like, oh, you want the best one, buy a harmony. You want the expensive one, buy the more expensive harmony. Best budget option, buy the cheaper harmony. Like, John, did just no one ever catch up to this? How did no one ever catch up to this? Well, why would you? I guess fair. I mean, I think other companies probably saw the writing on the wall and that this isn't a good direction to go in 2012.

Right. But if you're a logite, you're completely part-limited at this point. And if you look at these remotes, you look at the 900 Madhazer, the picture that won, it's just turning into a smartphone. That's the thing that's happening to this device. You're like, oh, we should put a touchscreen on it. Oh, we should link it up with a bunch of external radios to control your smart. home. Oh, it should have some compute in it. Oh, it has an internet service. It's like, so it's

an iPhone, but it doesn't leave my living room. Yeah, it's like Apple Plus HomeKit just basically solves this. Yeah, exactly. That sounds like another episode. Yeah, agreed. So, okay, so we keep going and then in 2018 Logitech basically

starts to just tear the thing down. They turn off the harmony link that made a lot of this stuff work. You can still do some of the basic IR stuff, but all of the sort of advanced ideas at this point are gone. And then Brack and Daryl, who is at that point, the CEO, comes on your podcast, Nilai Patel, and I would say kind of just puts a knife through the whole thing. Very casually. This is a series of Logitechio showing up in Decoder and just stepping in it. It's a longstanding tradition. That's what we do. But yeah, he was like, yeah, I don't, why would we

make remotes? That seems dumb. I have a clip where he describes it. And this, This traveled in a big way, and this was when a lot of people went, oh, this thing is dead. Let me play it. You have the market leader in that space in Harmony Remotes. What on earth is going on with Harmony Remotes? Well, you know, Harmony is a phenomenal product, as you know, if you want to really simplify a complex living room stack of stuff and get it down to a single remote and really simplify it. Sounds good. That is what it's, that's what it was originally conceptualized for, and it does that better than, I think, anything else.

and we like that it does that. Now, the future world is changing. It's really, you know, as you know, more and more is going through the internet. You know, you're getting, in a way, it's just as complex, but now you've got all these different streaming services, which are exciting, you know, which are getting more and more all the time. And so much of it's coming directly, you know, directly through the internet. And it's moved on. So, you know, I think, I think Harmony has a place to play in that.

But I also think we are not focused. focused on trying to figure out how Harmony can solve all that problem beyond that. I think that's probably the domain of other people. I mean, there it is. That's the knife through harmony. Boy, did he not want to say what he said. No. And then he said it anyway.

And I think there was like a walkback for a while. Yeah, they tried to pretend that they were still very committed to it. He also said to you on that show that the remote business for Logitech was about 6% the size of Logitex keyboard business. It was very clear that it was just like, we know that people have these and like them. we don't really care. We're not investing in them anymore. We are moving on. No longer the CEO of Logitech.

Too small of a business. Doesn't make sense. And this is probably why there were no big competitors either. You know, like market is shrinking. It just, yeah, it just doesn't make sense anymore for anyone. Although I will say, ironically, he identifies another problem in that clip, which is that it's really hard to find stuff to watch, which is correct and true. And like all the way back to the, what if we could zap program guides to your remote?

is like, no one has solved this problem, but he literally says to you that's somebody else's problem. Sounds like Netflix's problem. Yeah. Every episode in this Smart Home series of Virgin History boils down to, where's the computer in your house going to be? And the answer is in the TV. Like, it's just for this problem,

the answer is your TV is going to have an arm chip in some variant of Linux, and it's going to run apps, and it's actually just a giant tablet, and that's going to have a computer in it, and maybe you can control your voice, or maybe you can control it with whatever weird remote Vizio is going to dream up at this time, and boy, did they have a bunch of weird ideas at this time. But the idea of an IR-based controller talking to multiple devices because your content is in multiple places was just dwindling.

And then, you know, buttons for lights and shades, that market had not even begun to be a, even a glimmer of what it is today. So now you're like selling an even smaller number of people a solution that they probably don't even want. I get why he's saying it. But at the same time, because there's no competitor, it literally was they just unplugged the service from a lot of people. And they just called it and walked away.

And I think a lot of people are still furious about it. So this is actually kind of my last question on this front is why people are so furious about it. Like, even, I am the least experienced with Harmony Remotes of anybody on this episode. None of you have made any of these products sound any good. And like anyone should have ever liked them. And yet they had this incredibly dedicated group of users who loved them and have moved heaven and earth to continue to use them. John, why? Make this make sense to me. Oh, we want things to work out. Okay. We want them to be a successful remote. The innate optimism of human beings. Maybe. We want all of our things to.

to work together. It's why HDMI Interconnect we still want it to work properly. There's a home theater dream that was born in the 80s where we want all of our things to talk together and we want them all to

work properly together. And I just think there was a lot of people that you know, Matt, you brought up. It was 80% of the time it worked. But that 80% felt great. It's because you've accomplished something. You're like, I have orchestrated the system here.

Yeah. All of these things that shouldn't talk together, talked and started up in the order that you told them to. And that one time will drive you through the next six times that it doesn't work. I like how you've been like, it's the golf of technology. It's basically what you've, the case you've read here. Every once in a while, you pure it and it's gorgeous. Matt, what are you're, I mean, you're still using one. I mean, you like build products at Apple that destroy.

this thing. It's your fault that these don't exist anymore. Why do you still use them? I have no choice. My harmony has broken and I will go on eBay and buy someone's used model that is the same model so my macros could all transfer over because their services down. Because literally I have no choice. Like, look, if I went the kind of all in on the smart TV route, I think this would be a solved problem for me. But I'm still holding on to this home theater dream of having a fancy stereo system, having my PlayStation. my Xbox and having them kind of all work with one button. Maybe I need to give up the dream. Yeah. Hold on to it, Matt.

So this is important. And I think this is real for a lot of people. So I described my setup when I was a teenager at my parents' house in Wisconsin. My setup now, when I have children, is there's a TV, there's a receiver, there is an Apple TV, there is an collide escape, which John and I are both screwing with. Nice. There's a switch and there's a PS5. This is a lot of devices.

Yeah. All that need to be routed, input switched. And 80% of the time, HDMI, CEC works. Yep. That's the trick, is that? And it works. It's like just good enough for me to be like, I can mostly just have the Apple TV remote and the game controller is out. And I can get pretty much this is going to work.

Yeah. But then there's a box sitting on the coffee table with the receiver in the TV remote in it. Because when it doesn't work, you got to, you just got to turn things off. I still leave a sheet of instructions for the babysitter. That's bad. It should, I mean, because of that 20%, when it doesn't work, okay, well, this remote will help you do this and this remote will help you do that. If the TV remote doesn't do it. So the worst failure remote in our house is because it's a Sony TV, so it runs Android.

And so what you get that, I swear to God this is true. If nothing else works, you can just tell Google Assistant to turn off the TV. And it's like you're praying to heaven. you're like, just turn off the TV. Like, somehow that will always work. I don't know why, but that's the one, if all the remotes give up, that's the one that works. That's really funny. And that's really the direction we're going, right?

We're not screaming to heaven. Screaming to heaven, praying. But the remotes are going away. The whole idea is that you use your voice to do all of this stuff. Right. And this is sort of the train that moves through this industry, right? Because it's, we get the voice assistance, we get smartphones, we get the sort of ambival like Alexa computing stuff, we get smart TVs that build this stuff in.

There's just, if your goal is to turn on your television, you now have sort of infinite ways to do that. And what happens when Logitech gets out of this game is it just, the game dies. There are essentially at this point zero good universal remotes. There are a few companies that try after. Niel and I both got very excited by a company called Kavo for like 10 minutes. That was a thing. But no one, no one has stepped in or even really tried.

Can I explain the Kavo thing for one second? So the CAVO, this is pre-AI boom. Their solution to the problem of not knowing what was happening on the TV was that you would plug all of your devices into their device and it would use computer vision to click around the Apple TV interface for you. And this was very slow and very clunky and it sort of worked but didn't work. And they totally pivoted to be a totally different kind of business because they put a bunch of hardware in a bunch of TVs. but they were like, how do we close the feedback loop? We're going to literally watch the Apple TV. And none of this was ready at the time.

This was like years and years ago. None of this was ready at the time. But this is the level of like solutioning they had to do to use the TV for you. Then they ran into the immediate problem of people are buying smart TVs. They're using the apps on smart TVs and we can't see them. Our business is dead. It was like the last gasp of the universal remote multiple sources idea. And then they're like, yeah, we don't.

Everyone's just using Tison now. We're done. theory, AI blasts, AI agents, theory, agentic AI is the IRBlaster of 2026. I'm throwing that out there. I mean, I'm holding that hope that I still get this like universal smart home app with agentic AI. Our universal remote days are dead, but like at least maybe we'll get an app to rule them all one day. So this is actually, Matt, you have to leave us here in a minute, but this is actually my last

question for you, which is there's a world in which you are sort of living an unsolved problem, right? and the best thing that you have found is this Harmony setup for what you have. If somebody softwareed their way out of this and built you the app you're describing on your phone, does that completely solve your problem? Or is there something about the hardware of this thing that actually is meaningful in your setup still? I think we still need something in the home. Especially for legacy stereo systems, there's no way to solve the IR problem. This is, you're going to build a robotic button that pushes the buttons maybe.

And then you end, you still have the same issue. Like, do you know you hit the button? Is it actually on? It's tough. There's a reason why this is like one of these unsolved problems with like a rabid, loyal following, because still don't have a solution out there. Yeah. There's no solution, but also it's the kiss of death.

Dude, when the Xbox One came out and they're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to integrate with their cable box and we're going to have this weird, long IR blasters with the little cords and the bubbles. Everyone got mad at me because I think this product is doomed. Like I don't even read past the spec sheet. Like I saw IR blaster and weird long bubble repeaters. What are you doing? Yeah. And it was the same exact idea as web TV, which is also Microsoft product, which is I'm going to horsepower a Windows PC under your TV, but I don't have access to your actual TV. So I have to control your cable box in some way. And it's not going to work because I'm putting an overlay. I can just, I could talk about this forever. This basing your vision around IR, because it's the last universal standard for control, means you're dead. And I'm not saying this is a problem in 2026. I don't, I don't suspect there are a lot of startups out there being like, we're going to do IR blasting. But there was a minute when everyone was like, we're going to figure it out.

But you also didn't have a choice. I mean, like, it's not like our easy zapper friends missed some new technology that was sitting there available to them. It wasn't, like, Matt still can't control his stereo with anything other than I are. Like, this is just, this is maybe a problem without an elegant solution. Everybody understands what the answer ought to be, and it might be, as it turns out, fundamentally an unsolvable problem. Got to get up and push the button. Yeah, but for your vintage stereo, Matt, you got to be in the moment. You know, there's other, there's other audio components that you can control remotely, you know, like you get, you should go go put the, this is why the vinyl has made a comeback in my household.

I was never trying to logitech harmony, the record player. But the robot arm will do it for you. We should do an old episode of the robot arms. We should. All right, Matt, we need to take a break and you need to go. But before we do, Harmony Remotes, version history, Hall of Fame, yay or nay, what do you think? Now is your chance to vote. I'm a day.

Okay. Wow. The Last Jedi. I know. Wow. Today might be the true end of the Harmony Remote. All right. We're going to take a break and then we're going to go back.

We're going to do the eight version history questions. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. This has been super fun. Thanks for having me. We'll be back. All right, we're back. It's time now for the eight version history questions, the question we ask to determine the legacy of every product.

The first question is where does the Harmony Remote fit on the time? matrix. And the time matrix, everybody's favorite concept makes perfect sense. It charts idea versus time. Was it the right idea at the right time? Was it the wrong idea at the wrong time? Or somewhere in between. I actually think the harmony is an unusually fascinating version of this because I could argue into any one of these quadrants. Well, which harmony? Let's start at the beginning. We can even go with the very first one if you'd like to. My argument would be actually we should pick the 880 because again it is this sort of canonical work. It does. I'm fine with it. Move on.

Okay, we're doing fine. Because usually you force you to talk about one product. We did hoverboards as a concept, too, and it's like, we're never going to do another Harmony episode. So it's fun to, we're doing the whole thing this time. For this one, I would say, like, I'll let you choose if you'd like to. But it's either, we're either going to do the first one or we're going to do the 880, which is, again, the sort of canonical Harmony Remote in a lot of people's minds. Do you think that changes things?

Yes. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Okay. John, you go first. Where would you put it on this square? So for to go, let's do with the 880.

Sure. It's right there. I do think it was the right time. Okay. I think it was a misguided idea. Okay. So you would be a wrong idea right time? I would think, yeah, yeah, I think so.

Why do you think it's the right time? Because there wasn't anything else that was accomplishing it. Fair, fair. It was the right time for the type of product. I don't know if the type of product necessarily needed to exist. Interesting. That's a good way of looking at it. It was like they tried to solve the right problem.

Wrong. Yeah. I would say I am squarely at wrong idea, wrong time no matter what. Like I think there is a case to be made in those early days that the timing was right. But even then it's like this thing is just running into all of the things that will obviate it almost immediately. Like ironically, I think Steve Wozniak had the right time. In 1989, my guy tried to ship a universal. remote. And I think that, if he had not made such a weird one, might have had a chance to

last a long time. This thing is just immediately shipping into a world that doesn't need it anymore. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm overseeing it's late. It's like my version of this has a fourth dimension. Of course it does. Do you know what I mean? Like it just becomes increasingly more the wrong time over time. Okay. Do you know what I mean? Like it starts kind of edging at like right idea, right time. And then like as the years pass by. Oh, it definitely. And so like over the course of 10 years, it just spirals into the bottom core and like

explodes into flames. So it seems to me like we all agree it belongs on the wrong idea side of the spectrum because as happy as it makes all of us, it couldn't and maybe wasn't ever going to do the thing it aspired to do. But some people loved it. I don't know how to account for that. This is the problem. Like, it had such a devoted...

This is why you need the fourth dimension of times. That's true. That's true. And I do think... Love does not fall into those simple categories. Yeah. And what you were saying about the sort of magic of solving the problem, I do think there is something underrated in this story about just the nerd project of it all. Oh, 100%.

That there is just like... You were sitting in front of your computer attaching a remote by a thin cable. Yeah. And that is both the pan and fun as hell all at the same time. It is. It is. I mean, for sick individuals, it absolutely is. Again, if they had just gotten away from the macromedia wizard interface, it would have been even more fun.

Yeah. But that thing was a dog fight. The wizard was awful. There was an era of computing where every app was like, I know what you're trying to do, and I won't let you just do it. You will have to answer a flowchart of quiz questions before I do what you want. It's like, I don't need this kind of help. Yeah, this sounds awful. It was just absolutely that experience over and over again.

Yeah, that's rough. Okay, so I think for the time matrix, we're going to leave it at wrong idea, and we'll put it kind of towards the middle, but like lightly on the side of wrong time. Again, this cube should be spinning through the cosmos. No one's listening. Eli, question number two. Question number two, was this peak anything? I have a couple I'd like to offer you.

Was this peak universal remote, I think pretty clearly, yes. Sure. Was this peak IR blaster? No, that was the Xbox One. The Xbox One was like a company-wide bet, an audience. are blasting that everybody should have known better. Fair. So was this peak TV remote?

And I will allow you to pick any harmony you want for this. Is a harmony, any harmony, the best TV remote, just as a pure remote to hold in your hand in use? No, we did a whole TV episode. You don't think so either? No. This wasn't peak TV remote? No, because it doesn't do what it needs to do 100% of the time. Fair.

Rough. That is fair. And actually, that's a good distinction from TiVo, which did its job exceptionally well. Yeah. Yeah. But you also weren't expecting it to do everything else. It wasn't a magic wand for your house. Yeah, the Tivo would hard map the volume controls to your TV or receiver.

It gave you a power button that was hard mapped to your TV. And that was the limit of its designs on other devices in your house. And for 90% of the people in the world, that's all they needed. That was probably more than they needed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Do you guys have anything else? Peak anything? In many ways it's peak gadget. Right? It's a product of that smartphone era where everything became kind of a computer gadget.

Yeah. This is why people like it. Right. It's like one of the gadgetiest gadgets you can get in your house. So like in many ways this still is that dream. Yeah. Like what if you can gadgetify a remote control? And like there's no. That's pretty good. That's what it looks like. Yeah. So I think that that one's pretty good there. Yeah. I think that's the one. It's just such a weird pre-smartphone. device. Yeah. And then it eventually just got killed by the smartphone. Yeah. It's definitely peak zapping. No one has ever zapped like this remote zapped.

It is also peak screen in the wrong place on a thing. Yep. I don't think anything has ever had a screen in such the wrong place. They made a whole case for why it was ergonomically better to have the screen on the bottom. And they're just dead wrong. Yep. Just dead wrong.

All right. Moving on. Question number three. If you could time travel back, and then in this case, we're going all the way back to like 1999. and develop it yourself, could you make the product more successful? Could we tell our Canadian friends something that would have made this thing do better and hit harder? There were too many problems to overcome.

Interesting. I don't think it necessarily could have happened better with the technology of the time. You've got the simpler one behind you. That's like a 500 or 700? What's that one? That's the simpler harmony. Yeah. So this is the vastly more successful product.

Yes. This is a 520. 520. So this one, it has a tiny screen. It just has the four little buttons at the top. But the rest of it is dead simple universal remote control. Once again, the volume buttons are just an abomination on this thing. They're teeny tiny. The volume control should always be the biggest buttons that are remote. But it has transport controls. It has a bunch of control menus. You can map this stuff. But it was just simpler. It did not have all the grand designs of this remote. And it was cheaper. So this one, I think for a lot of people, is the canonical universal remote. This is the one. that they had. This is the one that they worked. You programmed it once. It wasn't trying to run 500 macos. If it was, maybe you'd actually never even set them up. Do you know what I mean? Like, so do you think the answer, like, if your time traveling back, are you telling these guys, like, do less? Do less. Yeah. Actually, the funniest button on this. I think the 880 has it too, but it might be smaller. So you can see, it's the same layout, really, on both remotes. But in this one, the word help is printed at the time. And it's, if the macro failed, you could push help and it would run the macro. It would do all the I or commands again. But it's like this thing, they needed to land here more than they landed there. Right? They needed to land at the 520, the simpler, more focused, more effective product. And they put all of their resources chasing the smartphone with the 900 and the one and everything else.

This is actually a good segue way to the next question, which is, will the youth ever make it cool again? So they already have. There's a company called Sofa baton that is basically just... You just made that up. That can't be... That's one of the major ones. But like there are, you know, Matt's saying this is like, not a market. This isn't a thing. Like, there are companies in this space still that make consumer

products that people like. I agree that cool is a challenge. But if you think you're going to be in a more offline mode in some way or less phone centric, you're going to end up at a device like that. So, John, the reason I bring this up is I think we are in a moment where people are eager to spend less time staring at their phone to do things. And I think a thing that is true and has been particularly true with televisions is that using your phone as a remote for your TV mostly sucks. It's awful. And everybody tried to do it for a while. And I think has largely pulled back. And now we just have like the crappy remote you get with your Roku that is most people's experience of their TV. But do you think this idea of a physical remote to do TV things, but also potentially some other basic smart homey things, has a place in our lives right now.

I mean, I think it can have a place in our lives, but I don't think it's going to come from a remote that doesn't come. with your TV. Interesting. So you think like accessory remote just... I just don't think... I just don't think... I think it was hard enough, especially for the more expensive ones,

to sell a general consumer on the idea of spending $200 on an extra remote. And I think it's just as hard now. I mean, the TV remotes that are out now are fine. As long as they're not controlling tithes in, then things are good.

I mean, this comes back to where it's a computer, right? My Apple TV is deeply, integrated into the smart home and system in our house. It's mostly home kit. And I can talk into the Apple TV remote and turn off all the lights. And like that's because the computer is over there connected to the bigger computer that is the house. Well, and it's been interesting to see at various points the Rokos and Amazon's and apples of the world have tried to poke at some of these ideas. Roku went down this road for a while. How do we use your TV remote that comes in the box to control other stuff? And I think like we've been saying with all of this, I have

deep skepticism of the attached rate of any of that stuff. Does anybody set up any of these devices that require any work to get working? I assume not. But it just doesn't seem to have become a priority for anybody. Like, you just need to turn on your TV. The end. Yeah. And then you need to get to some streaming video. And at the end, when you're there, it is all largely the same. Yeah. So even the path from here to there kind of doesn't matter, which is why all these interfaces are bad. So we don't think there's a future for interesting, thoughtful physical remotes. No, I don't think so. Yeah, you need a power button, a volume control, and transfer buttons.

It does. I think it's all it's all the remotes are now. They're a power button, they're a volume button, and their transport controls. And the microphone. That's it. That might be all that you need. Yeah. You want it to be happy.

You got a sofa baton. Come on. But I'm even looking at the sofa baton and I'm like, I have no use for this. Like, I think there's something to simple controls for things like this. I actually, it's really interesting to look at the picture of the sofa baton because it has a lot. a lot in common with very old, like, easy zappers. It's a few buttons. It doesn't do a lot.

It is very clearly designed to do a couple of things for you very simply and well. Like control the volume of your television, and that's it. And that's actually maybe all we need from some of these things. All right. Moving on. Question number five. This is a tricky one given that we just declared the final death of physical remotes. What feature of the Harmony remotes would you put on current remotes?

notes. Oh, I know. I know what it is. It's the help button. It just tries it all again. I mean, I wouldn't execute it that way. But the idea that the thing is broken, I can't get it to work, and like you should figure it out. Perfect.

Interesting. That's not bad. The idea that more devices in your life should have a button that is just clearly marked help. And it's not like a weird chat bot interface. Like, whatever that thing is, but like it will actually try to solve the problem for you. That's great. We should bring that back. That's not bad.

John, what do you think? I would love for macros to work. Fair. I mean, I would love to be able to just do that. But, yeah, I think the help is probably the most useful. Yeah, one of the ones that drives me the most crazy is, like, you use, I have a Roku TV through which I almost exclusively use the Google TV streamer because Roku's interface is awful and makes me angry.

And you can go in and you can set the default HDMI thing that it's supposed to go to. And boy, does that not work correctly. And so all of these things are just, they do constantly. make you do more things. And I think the idea of like all the remotes now, they have, you know, there's a Netflix button and a like Disney Plus button or whatever. And all these companies pay to be on the remotes. I would so much rather have those be like programmable macros.

That would be amazing. Some of them are. Some remotes will come with the programming capability. You get like one. You get a star button. Yeah. Great. Thanks.

And now I have a paramount plus button for a service I don't have. Have you thought about not buying the cheapest ad-supported TVs on the market? Why would I have you spent money. You would get features. I bought a frame TV because you told me to and it's ruining my life. Because you are going to buy an even cheaper knockoff of the frame TV. That's fair. But now at least my TV knows when it's on and when it's off.

All right. Three more questions, the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Three questions, three tests that the product has to pass to get in. And again, to be the most generous we can, we can consider the whole harmony lineup. I'm willing to give you 25 years of harmony to make it past these. And spoiler alert, I think I'm with. Matt, I don't think it's going to make it. Question number one, did the Harmony do something truly new?

Yes. The answer to that one's yes. What? The idea that they were going to link together everything with macros and like solve the, they tried. They legitimately tried. Yep. Not what it says.

So this is actually, I'm being pedantic for a reason here because like, did this product have new, interesting, important big ambitions? Unquestionably, yes. No, I mean, literally, like we're going to link together all the macros to turn on everything in sequence and you can push, watch a movie, and we'll fire the macro off. that was new. It was legitimately new and it did that. Okay.

And 80% of the time. It worked. Did this product, parentheses, kind of sort of mostly, end parentheses, do something truly new? Yeah. I buy that. Okay. Hall of Fame question number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad?

No. This is brutal. Middle of the road. It was as middle as it gets. Yeah. Ironically, I feel like it was both things, right? It wasn't just that it was down the middle because it was both remarkably good. and remarkably bad.

80% of time is remarkably good. It was a 20% and it was remarkably bad. It was heartbreakingingly bad. Yeah. Like I don't know anyone who has medium feelings about the Harmony Remote.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. It's not like a milk toast television experience. It is either doing magic or it's utterly infuriating because the people got it were enthusiastic about it

and they were either excited about the 80% of the time or they were furious about the 20% of the time. So, okay, here's actually an unrelated question I've been thinking about a lot in doing the research for this. Should Logitech have tried to make deals to become a default remote? And basically like instead of Comcast shipping you its crappy membrane remote, try to ship a remote like this as your default cable box remote,

but then add on this additional vision to it that it's like, okay, we're going to sort of Trojan Horsear Smart Home idea into your cable box remote. So they absolutely tried to do this. I think they might have even succeeded in a handful of places. The problem is that the cable companies were cable companies and they were not interested in spending one additional penny on any customer. Fair. Which is also kind of the downfall of remotes in general. Right. I mean, like they were going to ship you the good enough remote. They remain unchanged for 25 years. Like, you can't have a vision that depends on the cable company being like, we're going to invest in innovation. It's not a choice. We're going to make good hardware products.

That's not going to happen. Yeah, that's fair. Which I guess is why that was also the demise of TiVo was starting to make that particular decision. Fair enough. All right. Hall of Fame question number three, not that it matters. Sorry, Harmony remotes. Did it change history?

Was it, is there a world before it and a world after it? If it had changed history, Microsoft, we would never ship the Xbox One. I don't know how much more clearly I can say this. So in that sense, it did. It killed Microsoft. No, it didn't prove the point that IR was the kiss of death enough to dissuade one of the largest companies in the world from destroying the legacy of its gaming division. So I really do, this all makes me wonder, Neil, like, do you look at this as a completely unsolvable problem that EasyZapper and then Logitech gave like a real earnest college tried to, but that nobody was ever going to do it? And actually, we needed a different kind of technical innovation to get away from this.

Yeah, you could probably build a product like this. today that looks a lot closer to the vision and is a lot more successful built on H-DMI-C-E-C. Yeah, like with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, you can much more easily connect to many more things. Yep, you can probably get there. And then the problem, as Matt said over and over again, is the market for that is zero, because everyone already has a smartphone, which is 100% that thing, right? Like, if you want to control my TV, you can open the horrible Sony app on my smartphone, and you can just do that thing, and it can also control the house, and you can also look

at the catalog of movies and actually buy one and send it. Like there's a whole universe of things you can do with a phone being like, here's a dumber phone that only works in your living is just like, what are we doing? Buttons. Buttons are great. But then you're like, okay, what is what buttons do I need? You need a power button, a volume button, and some transport controls. Yeah. John, what do you think? Like, you have a thousand TVs in your house right now. I want everybody to close their eyes and picture, John, just surrounded by television. That is his earnest day-to-day life, like the version of this that exists on today's technology with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and HDMI CEC and like even go back to the we're going to zap program guides.

We're doing deep link search into this, but it is a hardware product. Does that do anything for you? No. For mine nostalgia only. Okay. Why not? Why does it not compel you? Because I don't need it.

I mean, the phone would be fine. The remote that comes with the TV would be fine. I mean, honestly, the Apple TV remote is fully functional for what I need it to be. So we really have just kind of good enoughed our way out of this being a useful product at all. Yeah, I think so, unfortunately. The fact that Roku gets to have a good remote and be the one that everybody uses just fills me with Rage. I mean, they're a new cable company. Yeah.

Are you going to spend one extra penny on your customers, Roku? And the answer is no, we're going to put more ads into their face. Yeah, fair enough. All right. Well, Harmony, you didn't make it in, but we all love. you bizarrely. Everyone wanted you to be good. That's really true.

We all wish you had been there. I do still really want to find my Harmony One and try it. It'll work once. It'll feel incredible and then you'll put it away and never use it again. Yeah, probably. That's the dream. That's what we're here for. All right, we are done here.

Thank you both for being here. This is delightful. I feel better about never having a home to Harvard Deer Robot next to this episode. So it's been great. I'm going to go home. I'm going to get you on Xbox One. We're going to put a K walks under it and we're going to really, really experience something. I go home and scream into my frame TV, which makes you push a rocker to mute the horrible.

Somebody make me a better remote. I promise I'll buy it, but nobody else will, so don't make it anyway. All right, we are out of here. Thank you to both of you. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. And a reminder that the best thing you can do is subscribe to the verge. You get all of our podcast to add free. You get to make sure that we get to keep buying old gadgets to keep doing stuff with.

Thank you, as always. We'll see you next. Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffron and Joe Nebris. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated version history podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrived,

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