Smart Devices and the Unix Philosophy

Companies keep building smart devices because they mistake what people say they want for what people actually use. "I want everything connected" sounds compelling in a focus group, but revealed preference tells a different story. Smart scales, smart coffee grinders, smart watches—most of these wind up abandoned or used in their dumbest modes because the connectivity adds cognitive load without proportional benefit.

I owned a smart coffee grinder that required a special app. The app eventually stopped getting updates and broke on newer operating systems. I never really used the smart features anyway. Now I have an OXO grinder with exactly three interaction points: rotate the top to set coarseness, turn the dial for grind time, press the button to start. Fewer features, but every feature works every single time.

The Unix philosophy—do one thing well—applies to physical objects just as much as software. We consistently overestimate the value of feature richness and underestimate the cost of complexity. A device that does ten things poorly is worse than a device that does three things reliably. The problem is we don't realize this until after we've lived with the complicated version.

My G-Shock has no Bluetooth. It gets time updates from radio towers, runs on solar power, and tells time perfectly. That's it. I'm happier with it than I ever was with my Apple Watch, which could theoretically do dozens of things but required constant attention and never felt trustworthy.

Smart devices fail when they optimize for feature lists rather than user behavior. Manufacturers keep building them because stated preferences sound good in product meetings. But in practice, people consistently choose reliability over capability. We'd rather have three features that always work than thirty features we can't trust.