Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes
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Logitech has gone from one of the best tech brands to essentially garbage.
Their mice are great, until they need a subscription, for some reason...
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Those devices are from 2008/2009
I'd be surprised to get 10 years of support on any technology product, let alone 17 years
A TV, and by extension it's remote, are the kinds of tech you want to last as long as possible. I have a 42" Sharp Aquos TV (one of three TVs in my house) from 2007. Except for a tiny patch of dead pixels from my 3 y.o. son throwing a toy at it, the 1080p display is as clear and bright as the day it was built. It has 2x HDMI inputs, component (for my PS2), RCA inputs, and something else I'm forgetting. Works fantastic.
There is absolutely no reason why a universal remote should require a connection to a remote server to function. Program the codes, make some macros, and you're done. No server needed.
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I’d imagine any company open-sourcing their code has to go through a pretty decent amount of re-written routines. Nvidia has been open-sourcing their drivers, but it’s been taking forever. I can only imagine how complex commenting GPU firmware must be.
Or you could just winamp it.
Oh, right, that's a terrible idea.
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Eh sorta but not really? Google released firmware to let you convert it to a regular Bluetooth controller, and although it was for a limited time, it's still available on GitHub.
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I love my Elite but I think it’s absolutely stupid that I have to connect to one of their servers in order to change activities and buttons. There is literally zero reason for that. You could easily have an app that connects locally to the device and can do it there. I could see needing their service if you want to download new remote profiles but that should be it.
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I’d imagine any company open-sourcing their code has to go through a pretty decent amount of re-written routines. Nvidia has been open-sourcing their drivers, but it’s been taking forever. I can only imagine how complex commenting GPU firmware must be.
Nvidia has been open-sourcing their drivers, but it’s been taking forever.
It's been taking forever because they're moving a lot of code into the firmware to keep it closed source. It's essentially a brand new driver that takes advantage of newer firmware.
That's one of the reasons the open-source driver only works with Turing (2000 series) and newer cards - they don't want to spend the time updating older firmware to handle the open-source driver.
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Logitech has gone from one of the best tech brands to essentially garbage.
At work, quite a few people use Logitech mice, but the IT security team had to block Logitech Options because Logitech added some sort of AI functionality to it without adding a killswitch for enterprise customers... On the positive side, people learnt about alternative apps to reconfigure the mice that don't have any of Logitech's bloat.
iTerm added AI stuff but at least they added a killswitch (a setting in a plist file I think) to force it to be disabled.
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A TV, and by extension it's remote, are the kinds of tech you want to last as long as possible. I have a 42" Sharp Aquos TV (one of three TVs in my house) from 2007. Except for a tiny patch of dead pixels from my 3 y.o. son throwing a toy at it, the 1080p display is as clear and bright as the day it was built. It has 2x HDMI inputs, component (for my PS2), RCA inputs, and something else I'm forgetting. Works fantastic.
There is absolutely no reason why a universal remote should require a connection to a remote server to function. Program the codes, make some macros, and you're done. No server needed.
Yeah this is the part I don't understand. Does the remote not have onboard storage?
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Logitech has gone from one of the best tech brands to essentially garbage.
Sad but true.
And they are taking some good stuff with them.Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason.
Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.
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I love my Elite but I think it’s absolutely stupid that I have to connect to one of their servers in order to change activities and buttons. There is literally zero reason for that. You could easily have an app that connects locally to the device and can do it there. I could see needing their service if you want to download new remote profiles but that should be it.
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Even their hardware design these days is them copying popular products from smaller tech companies
from smaller tech companies
Like what?
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Gonna be a pity not having 32 bands of eq on that puppy though...
Also when a new version of the speaker comes out you probably won't even find out about it for like a month since you won't be getting a push notification about it while you're driving.Oh no!
....well anyway
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Sad but true.
And they are taking some good stuff with them.Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason.
Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.
Mama's got a squeeze box.
Daddy never sleeps at night.
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I love my Elite but I think it’s absolutely stupid that I have to connect to one of their servers in order to change activities and buttons. There is literally zero reason for that. You could easily have an app that connects locally to the device and can do it there. I could see needing their service if you want to download new remote profiles but that should be it.
But then how are they supposed to collect data?
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A TV, and by extension it's remote, are the kinds of tech you want to last as long as possible. I have a 42" Sharp Aquos TV (one of three TVs in my house) from 2007. Except for a tiny patch of dead pixels from my 3 y.o. son throwing a toy at it, the 1080p display is as clear and bright as the day it was built. It has 2x HDMI inputs, component (for my PS2), RCA inputs, and something else I'm forgetting. Works fantastic.
There is absolutely no reason why a universal remote should require a connection to a remote server to function. Program the codes, make some macros, and you're done. No server needed.
Uh.. these remotes connect to Logitech servers so they can get infrared codes and button configurations for new devices from Logitech's (constantly updated) device database - and also so that people who have taken the time to manually 'learn' and label a new device's remote functionality can upload it to the central service for others to use. I can't add a TV released last year to my 10 year old Harmony remote without such a service.
So yes, there's absolutely a reason for them to need to connect to a server. They also do not need '24/7 network access', instead they connect once in a blue moon if and when you wish to modify your remote's config.. via USB.
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I love my Elite but I think it’s absolutely stupid that I have to connect to one of their servers in order to change activities and buttons. There is literally zero reason for that. You could easily have an app that connects locally to the device and can do it there. I could see needing their service if you want to download new remote profiles but that should be it.
Their app is predominantly a web front end. You could previously program your remote entirely via their website years back iirc. They had to program this component as you say for getting new remote profiles.
To be fair, why would they bother programming a 'local only offline mode' for your specific use-case when Internet connectivity was ubiquitous long before these devices were released?
Like yeah in retrospect it would be helpful now, but as a business decision it would have made very little sense to Logitech.
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I'm bummed about this, but it's not a shock given they retired the brand back in 2021. So much for "we will support these devices for as long as they continue to be used" however. This will generate a lot of e-waste.
I have an 880 that my family use regularly with the TV/AV/etc. I don't mind so much navigating the three remotes and several buttons to get movies or TV running, but it'll be annoying having all the extra remotes out on coffee tables all the time now, and repeated instructions to the rest of the fam on how to use them 🥲
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I really want to build an ESP32 remote and hub combo with a community-owned device database. I have the know-how, but alas, not the time.
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I really want to build an ESP32 remote and hub combo with a community-owned device database. I have the know-how, but alas, not the time.
Haha, exactly my first thought on reading this. Release some 3D printed cases too.
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I desperately wish they would make a new harmony remote or someone else would make a full featured universal remote. I know I am in the minority there I am sure.
