Logitech Harmony

» see logitech.com/harmony as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

harmony's pitch was that you should be able to press one button labeled "watch tv" and have the whole stack turn on in the right order. tv, receiver, cable box, soundbar. the remote learned ir codes for thousands of devices and stored macros that handled the choreography for you. it was the first product that made universal remotes feel like software instead of buttons.

the brand was born in 2001 in mississauga as easy zapper. logitech acquired the parent company intrigue technologies in 2004 for $29 million and kept the harmony name. for the next decade and a half harmony was the default answer when an av-forum thread asked which universal remote to buy. then logitech announced on april 9 2021 that it would stop manufacturing the line. existing remotes kept working, but the brand was effectively done.

i missed the harmony era. universal remotes that programmed over a usb cable were a category that lived inside the kind of home theater setup turkey did not really build at scale. when you ran a movie night in ankara in 2010 you used a laptop and a hdmi cable, not a $300 wand with macros. by the time logitech announced the end, the remote i was using for anything was my phone's volume buttons.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

the trick was the database. harmony's web tool let you tell it which devices you owned, and it pulled the ir codes from logitech's cloud library. the higher-end models added an rf hub so the remote could control gear stashed inside a closed cabinet. by the harmony elite era in 2015 the device could also speak to wifi appliances and philips hue lights. for about five years it was the most general-purpose ir-bridge consumer product on the market.

~ the decline ~

two things killed the category. the first was that home theater itself thinned out. people stopped buying receivers and disc players. the soundbar replaced the multi-channel stack for most households, so you did not need a programmable macro to coordinate two boxes. the second was that the phone took over remote duties. once netflix lived on the tv as an app and you could pause with your voice, the case for a $300 wand thinned considerably.

~ the day it died ~

logitech announced the manufacturing wind-down on april 9 2021. the company said it would keep selling existing inventory and would continue to support remotes already in homes. the website kept publishing firmware updates until 2025. then logitech sunset the cloud service for the older models in may 2025. remotes set up before that date keep working. remotes that need reprogramming do not. the elite gear in the cabinet now answers to a phone that does not understand it.

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