Nest Protect is a terrible buggy product

Brad Fitzpatrick · 1M views · 2015-02-13 · 5:57

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Overview

Brad Fitzpatrick records himself struggling to silence a set of first-generation Nest Protect smoke alarms that keep beeping and triggering one another.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the famous example of how over-clever smart-home devices can fail at something as basic as a smoke alarm.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2025

Topics

Consumer devices & gadgets UX & UI design

What people said

kyrra · 2020-08 · Recommendation
(googler, opinions are my own) I honestly like bradfitz's youtube video the best to show the Nest Protect (the smoke alarm) issues[0]. They have since fixed these issues, as this was the gen one protect. For your #2 (no insider knowledge), that looks like people's accounts getting hacked and then the hackers talking through them. All home camera cloud based cameras have had these cases. I think Nest moving to Google account login system for Nest is probably the best protection against this kind of thing happening. Account takeovers happen, and guarding against them at scale is hard (especially when people reuse passwords). For #1, I think the culture has changed a lot as it's been absorbed into Google's hardware division. Hopefully it's better, but I couldn't say anything of value there. [0] [VIDEO] (warning, loud video)
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rdtsc · 2016-01 · Recommendation
In line with this is the classic "It Can't Be Hushed Here" Nest bug video, by Brad Fitzpatrick from last year: [VIDEO] [Warning: contains extremely annoying Nest smoke detectors beeping. So prepare to lower your volume] Brad looks very annoyed and it was no fun for him, but on an artistic level it is really well done, it is an epic battle between human and machine.
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dekhn · 2025-03 · Reference
Only took ten years: [VIDEO] At the time, Fitzpatrick worked for Google and got in a small amount of trouble for posting this video. The nest creator (Fadell) and the head of INfrastructure (Hoelze) both criticized him prominently internally. A number of googlers were suspicous and we started talking to the product managers for Nest Protect and it turned out they knew about this problem, the product was just defective. At that point, Nest more or less went on life support and Tony eventually bailed ( [LINK] ) I remember walking into an office and seeing a group of Nesters sitting under a clock that counted down until they were allowed to transfer out of Nest. My gosh, google is just terrible with physical products.
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Sources

Video by Brad Fitzpatrick, played through YouTube.

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