Nest Learning Thermostat (1st and 2nd gen)

» see nest.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nest never came to turkey. Homes here run on a kombi, a wall mounted gas boiler with its own controller, and the smart thermostat arrived as a category shaped around american forced air heating and british gas boilers. So this is a product i have read about for fourteen years and never had on a wall. What makes that worth saying out loud is that in april 2025 Google agreed with me, announcing it would stop launching new Nest thermostats in europe at all, because european homes were too varied to build for.

The first one went on sale on 25 october 2011, out of Nest Labs, founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both of whom had come from Apple and the iPod. The pitch was that the least considered object in the house deserved the same attention as a phone. It was a metal ring around a display that watched what you did to it for a week. After that it ran the schedule it had learned, instead of the one you were never going to program.

A second generation followed on 2 october 2012, thinner and compatible with more heating systems, and a european version of it arrived in 2014. Google bought Nest Labs in january 2014 for 3.2 billion dollars and the thermostat became the anchor of everything Google went on to sell for the home.

Then on 25 april 2025 Google published a notice saying support for those first two generations would end exactly six months later, on 25 october 2025, which happened to be fourteen years to the day since the first one shipped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you actually bought ~

The interesting question a thermostat raises is what the purchase covered. Two hundred and fifty dollars bought an object that was screwed into a wall and wired into a heating system, an act with more permanence than downloading an app. Nobody signed up for a subscription and nobody was told there was a clock running.

But the reason to buy it over a fifteen dollar dial was never the metal ring. It was turning the heat on from a train and getting an alert when the temperature dropped somewhere it should not have. All of that ran through servers, and servers are a running cost attached to a device that was sold once in 2012.

~ the cracks ~

Google has form here. Revolv was a smart home hub the company acquired and then switched off entirely in 2016, seventeen months after buying it, which is still the reference point for hardware killed by its own vendor. Nest Secure went the same way in 2020. Each time the answer was that support could not run forever, which is true, and each time the object on the wall went on existing anyway, which is also true.

The european half of the announcement was blunter than the american half. Google was not just ending support, it was leaving. EU owners were sent a discount code for a thermostat made by tado, a german competitor, valid until 30 november 2025. Handing your customers to a rival with a coupon is a clear way of saying the market was never worth the engineering.

~ what survived ~

On 25 october 2025 the affected units were unpaired from the Nest and Home apps. Remote control went, and so did the alerts and the Home and Away automation. A connected Nest Protect also stopped being able to shut the heating down when it detected carbon monoxide, which is the one loss on the list that is a safety feature rather than a convenience.

What is left works. You can walk to it and turn the ring, set a schedule on the device itself, and it will heat the house exactly as well as it did in 2012. It has simply gone back to being a thermostat with an unusually good screen. The lesson is old and keeps needing to be relearned: hardware bolted into a building outlives the company's interest in it by a decade, and everything smart about it was only ever borrowed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »