This episode of Version History explores the origin, launch, and legacy of the Nest Learning Thermostat, tracing how Apple veterans Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers disrupted a stagnant industry in 2011. The hosts and guests examine Nest's design philosophy, its 'iPod of thermostats' cultural moment, and how Google's 2013 acquisition ultimately stalled the product's ambitious smart home vision. The episode concludes by inducting the Nest into the Version History Hall of Fame for genuinely changing the trajectory of the smart home industry.
- Nest's core innovation wasn't the thermostat itself but the insight that automating a universally neglected device (most programmable thermostats were never programmed) could deliver real energy savings without requiring user behavior change.
- The 'accidental standardization' of thermostat wiring across the US was a critical, underappreciated enabler of Nest's success — it allowed a startup to build one product that worked in millions of homes.
- Tony Fadell's Apple-trained obsession with power management directly shaped Nest's founding principle: turn things off when not in use, applied at the home scale.
- Google's acquisition of Nest in 2013 is widely seen as the moment the product's innovation stalled — internal culture clashes, competing divisions, and lack of cross-pollination killed the roadmap.
- The bundled screwdriver was a strategically underrated product decision: it reduced installation friction, kept the brand in users' hands, and signaled a complete, thoughtful product experience.
"We're building a green home in Lake Tahoe. My architect actually gave us a spec for the heating and cooling system was about $15,000. And then this $15,000 system was controlled by $350 thermostats. I said, I think I can design a better one."
"He had it covered in black cloth in the center of the table. And he went on and on about unloved gadgets in the home and the big opportunity. And he kept gesturing at it, but he wouldn't tell us what it was. And then he pulls the cloth off, and it's a thermostat."
"It was the first Internet connected smart device that caught the sort of attention of the tech press and the public. It brought everything together. And it was like, oh, now we can use our phones to control our homes. And that was the beginning of the smart home that we're in today."
"Google just ruined this company. It is a really interesting thing because this thing happens, there is immediately so much enthusiasm for the smart home, everybody gets really excited, and then it all kind of collapses all at once."
"Tony wanted to build a product with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You don't have to know about my other plans. This product will make you want me to have other plans, which is the most Apple thing."
If you were to close your eyes and think about a thermostat, I can basically guarantee you that the thing you're imagining in your mind is a design from the 1950s. And for way too long, that was the best idea anybody had about thermostats. But in 2008, Tony Fadell, one of the most important people behind the iPhone, decided maybe he could fix it. From the Virgin Vox Media. This is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and weirdest and most important gadgets in tech history. I'm David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about the Nest. All right, we're back. It is time for everyone's favorite gadget, the thermostat. Joining me in the studio are the Verge's senior Smart Home reviewer, Jen Tuohy. Hi, Jen.
0:00
Hi, David.
0:52
You brought, I would say, between 1 and 60 nests with you for this episode.
0:53
Yeah, well, you know, it's been an ongoing part of my Smart Home journey, testing thermostats. And I keep them because they keep getting new features and updates, and we. And we'll probably talk about some of that. But eventually, finally, the Nest worked with Apple Home. So this is true.
0:58
And if I have my timing right, you were really starting to cover the Smart Home kind of right about as this started to happen. Right.
1:14
Right when something else started.
1:21
This is true. Which brings us to. Neilai Patel is also here, buddy. You were starting this thing called the Verge when Nest happened. Like, Nest. Nest and the Verge launched, like, the same day. Was it really the same day?
1:23
Yeah, it was. The first big feature I wrote for the Verge was the Nest Learning Thermostat with a Tony Fadell profile. And we didn't know how to do anything. I was like, we should take a photo of Tony. And then we all looked at each other in the office. How do we do that?
1:38
Okay, we're just gonna jump ahead. Can I show you the picture we took of Tony? He's wearing a blue V neck sweater with his sort of head cocked to the side, and he's just holding a thermostat. And if you don't think about it too hard, it's a really cool picture. And then we're just like, what is Tony Fadell doing with his thermostat?
1:50
I took this picture in the bar of a fancy hotel in New York. And what I know about this picture is that Tony saw it and said the Verge took better photos than Wired, and then he made Nest take better photos of him.
2:04
Whoa.
2:19
I don't think I've Done a better job. I've been chasing that feature for the past 15 years.
2:21
That's pretty good. But so the actual NEST story starts substantially earlier than that. So Tony Fadell, for anybody who doesn't know, worked at Apple for a very long time, was part of the ipod team and the iPhone team. I think he is the person responsible for the prototype iPhone that had a click wheel, which kudos to Tony. We love this for Tony. One of my favorite things to do on this show is to try to find people's like mythological origin stories. Like, we've all been through this, right? You run a company long enough, you sort of invent a half true story about the amazing thing that led up to it. And over the years, Tony tells a bunch of them.
2:26
Yeah, I noticed this. Not just Tony, but everyone from that time period. It's all slightly different.
3:01
Yeah. But I think the story, I think the truest version of the story is that there are two things going on simultaneously for Tony Fadal. One is that like all rich people in the Bay Area, he has a house at Lake Tahoe. And he tells this story a bunch about going out to their house at Lake Tahoe where it's very cold and getting to the house and having to turn up the thermostat and then sleep, like in sleeping bags and with coats for the first night while their presumably enormous mansion heated up in Lake Tahoe. Which is a hilarious first world problem to have. But it's a.
3:08
He told me this story in person. Again, we were just like baby gadget bloggers. I did not have a house in Lake Tahoe. And the specific thing about that house I remember him telling me that I found both very aspirational and completely unrelatable was that he had installed like the fanciest geothermal energy efficient heating and cooling system.
3:39
Well, okay, so this is actually part two of the story.
4:00
Yeah.
4:02
So Tony has this house and then decides to build a better house because that's what you do. He. He leaves Apple, travels the world for a while. And this is another one of the mythological stories is that he travels around, they go to all these beautiful places and hotels and always the thermostat sucks and he gets really mad about thermostats. And it's like, I don't really believe any of that, but okay, Tony, sure. But then they start building this big new house in Tahoe. And let me just play you. Actually, this is a clip from the interview that he did with us and with you where he explains this part of the story. And I Think it's really fun.
4:02
We're building a green home in Lake Tahoe. My architect actually gave us a spec for the heating and cooling system was about $15,000. And then this $15,000 system was controlled by $350 thermostats. It's like $350 thermostats. What do these do? Cell phones are less than $350. These things gotta be amazing. So give me the spec. And they give me the spec. And I was like, wait a second. This thing has. They're ugly. They look like computers from the 90s. They're all beige boxes. They have technology literally from the 80s inside of them or 90s. I'm like, why am I paying for such junk? I said, I think I can design a better one.
4:32
This becomes kind of his thing. Tony has this idea, decides he wants to do this, and then he gets connected with Matt Rogers, who has this big dream about doing the smart home. He had been in intern on the ipod team way back when. So they got to know each other. Spent a long time together at Apple. You've been playing along with the nest story for a very long time, Jen. Is this. Does that sound right to you?
5:08
The story from Tony's side? Definitely. That's what I had heard. The Matt Rogers side was similar, but much more about the smart home. Like, Matt was much more like, we need to do smart home. He had just moved in or was renovating a house, I think, and he. He was still at Apple. He would stay in touch with Tony, and he's like, I want to do something different. And Tony's like, you're kind of nuts if you leave this job. And he's like, but I've been doing this. I've been working on my home, and I've been trying to make it smart. And he's like, I really think this is the beginning. This is the time we need to do smart home. And Tony was like, no, because he was right. I mean, it's an impossible dream, really. The smart home still is. But then he kind of focused in and said, but there is one thing we could start with. Like, that's what you need. You need to find that use case. And the thermostat was it. So it was kind of. They were both coming at it from, you know, Matt was coming at it from, like, let's fix everything. And Tony was like, I've got one good thing we should fix. And then they actually built from there.
5:26
I had conversations with the both of them throughout the course of Sort of the Nest story where we would just argue about making light switches and plug outlets, right? Cause I'm like, that's what. That's everything. And they would be like, it's too hard. Right? People are not going to replace all their light switches. Light switches come in all different colors and sizes. Like, that's too hard. We have to pick the product that we can get. And I think that the Tony of it was, I hate this thermostat. And I can definitely get you to replace your thermostat. I can make a product with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's very Tony, right? And you don't have to know about my other plans. Like, this product will make you want me to have other plans, which is the most Apple thing. Totally put that thing on your wall. And then you're like, why don't you do this other stuff I want? And Apple's like, oh, interesting. We've never had that idea before. And you can just see that in Tony at this, at this first little turn. The other thing I want to point out, and this is. This is just me, but I'm going to point this out. The. The thing that made the thermostat work as a product is that all the thermostats were the same. I would describe it as an accidental standard. Like, no one was like, we should standardize thermostats or like, we're lazy. And that was the end of that. But the Nest was able to. To ride on top of that in a really interesting way.
6:27
Yeah, that's interesting. So, and also the. The sort of Appleness of it ends up being really useful to Nest in a bunch of ways. One of which is they have, I would say, the easiest time raising money that I have ever heard of in Silicon Valley ever. Truly. Like, they. So they start this company in 2010. They. They get an office in a garage near Stanford, like all good startups do, and immediately have essentially their pick of VCs, their pick of people to hire, and their pick of. Of partnerships. Because Tony Fadell is the guy who made the iPhone, right? Like, this is. It is the shiniest thing you can possibly be. They start hiring people from Apple, which is really hard to do. Like, especially at this time. This is sort of the peak of Apple's powers, and they start poaching people from senior positions at Apple to come work on this stuff at Nest again. This pitch about, you know, make people's lives better, fix energy, work. They literally like, we're going to save the world is the thing they said earnestly over and over and over again in the early days of Nest and it starts working. Tony knows everybody, he knows all the investors, and they just set this thing up for success from the beginning. They have all the relationships. They become a like, fully functional company way faster than your average startup. And it's all because of the. The Apple shine, especially at that moment, which is really interesting. One thing Tony has been asked about a bunch, which I thought was fascinating, is whether this was an idea that was baking inside of Apple at the time. And he's always a little squirrely about it, honestly, because it's like the answer, I think sort of straightforwardly no, that Apple didn't. Didn't do HomeKit until several years later. It was actually behind on a bunch of that stuff. But also like the Apple TV was coming out and it was pretty obvious to everybody who saw on Apple TV that there's a bigger play here for how do we do stuff in your house? Everybody is starting to figure out interesting stuff you can do with your phone to control other devices. It's like you'd sort of be silly not to have looked at things around your house and been like, what if my phone could? You know what I mean? So it's like, was this baking inside of Apple and then he took it away. Becomes a point of a little bit of contention and consternation over the years. But in general, it seems like Tony's mansion story is still basically the founding myth. So anyway, so these guys set up this company, they raised a bunch of money and they decide they need to do two things to make the thermostat work. They have to make the nice piece of hardware. And they. That's like, that's the main thing. This has to be a nice thing that people actually want to put on their wall. And they decide they need to save money on their energy bill. And this is the thing I didn't realize. Those are like the two founding principles of Nest in a way that I don't think I really understood until prepping for this, that save people money on their energy bill was the thing.
7:43
The other thing I'll point out, and this is half conspiracy theory, if you're Matt and Tony and you're working at Apple at that time and you've done the ipod and the iPhone, however many generations you have, you are obsessed with power management.
10:18
Brad, that's a good point.
10:32
Your entire life is like, how much stuff can we turn off if people aren't using it?
10:33
Yeah, right.
10:36
Like, that is just the way your brain is operating, you're like, I gotta turn these radios off. Like, we gotta shut this down. And the nest is basically making it easier to program. Isn't a lot. It's, oh, you're not home. We're gonna turn your. Your furnace off. That's all it does.
10:37
Yeah.
10:52
And it. Then it figures out a schedule. And that schedule at first was so aggressive that people didn't like it. But you're like, oh, that's iPhone brain. Yeah, that's like, oh, you're not using the screen. We're gonna turn off.
10:52
Right.
11:02
Like, we gotta. This battery is very important to us. Like, we are going to turn things off. And you can see that thinking just gets applied to your house.
11:03
Or you're.
11:12
I'm not in my house. We should turn everything off.
11:12
Use it, turn it off. Right.
11:14
And like, that's how we're gonna save tons and tons of energy. And you're like, oh, I again, half a conspiracy theory. But if you're just operating in the power envelope of an iPhone, you can see how Tony just walked around his house flipping off light switches all the time.
11:15
Oh, yeah, yeah. He's one of those people who would definitely have just a list in his brain of how much energy every single thing is using every time the switch is on.
11:28
Yeah, he just has, like, the AR filter over his house.
11:37
So, okay, so they go. They spend about a year researching and building and prototyping, and then they start to put really primitive versions of the thing in people's homes to start to get data and see how it works. In particular, they're testing this idea of, like, can it start to automatically tune itself to understand how you live your life? And if you, you know, you always turn the temperature down at night, can your thermostat start to learn and just do that on your half? These are the things they're starting to. To tweak. And at the same time, Tony goes on a road show to start showing this to investors, to start showing it to people. They need to raise a bunch more money to, like, go and make a lot of thermostats. And I think from a little bit I've heard, you got a pretty good version of the dog and pony show. What was it like? Tell me about the Tony show. Tony is like a legendary pitch man.
11:41
He's very good at this. Yeah, Tony has pitched me a lot of things over the years, but I will never forget the first nest pitch again because he took us seriously, which I am just eternally grateful for. There was no reason at that time to take us seriously.
12:26
We were a blog called this is my Next.
12:40
Yeah, we were itty bitty, and our office was just pure garbage. But he showed up at our office. We had a little conference room, and he sat down and he had it covered in black cloth in the center of the table. And he went on and on about unloved gadgets in the home and the big opportunity. And he kept gesturing at it, but he wouldn't tell us what it was. And he says, we're gonna rein these unloved gadgets in your house. This. This is a big opportunity. And then he pulls the cloth off, and it's a thermostat. And I will tell you, I think this is why Tony actually took us seriously. After this, the first thing I said is, that's a round LCD screen. Those are really hard to make. At that time, that was true. And he was like, yes. And then we were like, off to the races. But that the. The. The fact of the object, at least from a gadget perspective, was just unlike basically anything that existed. If you remember, for years afterward, smartwatches all had the flat tire, right? Because it was just really hard to do a round display. And they could have gotten away with it because the sensor bar was a little flat tire under the round display. Like, this is a compromise they could have made.
12:42
We have the original one in studio,
13:49
and you can see it has a little flat tire of a sensor bar.
13:50
Oh, yeah.
13:53
And they just chose not to do it.
13:54
They disguise it really nicely.
13:55
Yeah.
13:57
And you just see, oh, this thing is just really well designed. It was heavy.
13:57
Yeah, it's a big.
14:01
The spinny motion was really good. And so after this big show about the home is this big opportunity, you know, I'm Tony Fadal. My house is a technical masterpiece that maybe if you're lucky, you'll get invited to, like, you know, it's like a lot of that. And he's just very compelling. He's like, I made all this stuff, and I'm going to show you my new product. And I'm just staring at it being like, what is it? Yeah, he did it years later with a nest protect. He's. I've got another one. But that time I was, like, just guessing, like, randomly.
14:02
Was there a black cloth on that one?
14:29
There was a black cloth on that one. He was like, and it's a smoke detector. Like, it was great. But that first one, you just looked at it and, you know, you have the first immediate set of questions. Who's Going to pay this much money for a thermostat? How long is the software support going to be? What happens when. Yeah, we just found out. And he was just prepared with all the answers, right? He just. He just knew the product was complete. And we had heard so many pitches at that time from people who wanted a. A bite of the ipod and the iPhone that their ideas were never complete. And just rarely we heard an idea that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And Tony is very good at that. He's a good storyteller. And the thing looked cool. And it was just. That's like in that meeting, I was like, I want to do a whole feature on this. We're going to take a cool photo of you. And then he was like, yeah, round LCD guy. You get it? And then I was like, we have to figure out how to take a picture of Tony.
14:31
I love that.
15:22
So one. One other thing that I think is really interesting, and then we should take a break and get to actually launching this thing. But there's one other thing that happens in the course of this testing. People really like the thing. People love having it on their wall. People like the experience of having a thermostat that learns. They start to get the sense that, like, we're onto something here. This is. This is powerful, this is gonna work. But the thing that they had also really invested in and knew at the beginning, to your point about the accidental standardization of this, installing the nest was actually not that hard. It, like, takes a little bit of work. You have to pull the thing off your wall and then there's a couple of wires you have to put in. But they had done a bunch of work to make it easy. They designed a back of it that was really straightforward and well labeled and really nice. And you fundamentally just pull your thermostat off, put this one on, put a couple of screws, put a couple of wires, and you were done. And mostly they found people could do it, right? Like, the people who are getting this, especially in the early days, are people who are like, prone to be willing to do a little bit of work to put a thing on their wall. But they were into it. But they discovered that half the time that people were spending installing the nest thermostat, they were spending finding the tools to install the nest thermostat. Like, literally they were like, this is a 60 minute process and 30 minutes of it is just gathering the tools required to make this happen. So they decide instead of just building a thermostat, they're Build a thermostat and a screwdriver.
15:23
Best screwdriver ever.
16:35
That's real. It's real. And that ends up being, like, a sneakily important part of the nest success story. It becomes like a beloved little screwdriver in people's house.
16:37
You don't get it anymore.
16:46
It's. We have one here. It's. It's this little, like, bulb white screwdriver that doesn't look like a tool, but it came with four interchangeable heads for all the things that you needed. And it was like this makes me think of. You know, you buy IKEA furniture, and they all come with those awful Allen wrenches that you have to just crank a thousand times. Like, what if every one of them just came with a lovely little screwdriver? Do you know how much more I would like IKEA furniture?
16:47
I mean, that was the win, right? They put that brand in your hand every time you needed a screwdriver, and you're like, oh, I love this little screwdriver. I love this little brand. And it totally worked. Ring eventually copied them, but the ring is not as good by far.
17:11
Yeah, no, it is great. And I think for the smart home in particular, it's the perfect screwdriver because there's so many little, like, I use it for everything still. Door locks, thermostats, smoke alarms, everything. And the fact that you can switch, that is just genius.
17:26
Yeah, it's really.
17:45
There's so many times where you're going to need the flathead, and then others where you're going to need the Phillips, and. Yeah. Oh, it's just perfect. You don't get it in the box anymore, which is very sad.
17:46
That is a shame.
17:56
I feel like we're just issuing criticisms of Google. We haven't even launched the thing yet, and we're like. And then Google's cheered it up.
17:56
But again, I think it goes back to the Apple ethos, right? Like, the whole thing is in the box and everything you need is right here. And again, it just makes the thing feel like a complete thought. And especially for something that you do fundamentally have to open up your walls and mess with the wiring makes it feel less stressful. They finished this thing and they're about to ship it. So let's take a break, and we'll come back. We got more to talk about. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So it's October 1, 2011, and the nest goes on sale. Do you remember what everybody called it?
18:03
No.
18:38
It was the Ipod of Thermostats oh, my God. Cool.
18:39
This almost certainly was in our story. It was.
18:41
This just immediately becomes what everybody calls it, which is like, it's Tony Fadal. But also it is. There is such a sense of like the Apple Y ness of it that does it huge favors. Everybody right out the gate just like professes deep and unabiding love for this thing, which is weird because it's a thermostat. And also, to some extent, like, kudos to Tony in particular. This thing was everywhere, like, everywhere. At the beginning, they got vastly more press coverage than I assume any thermostat ever has before or since. For the launch of the first Nest, this becomes kind of a phenomenon, right? Like they. They come to us. They were all over, you know, they were all over tv. They got tons of media. They got a big wired story. It was like they sold themselves as a tech company making thermostats, and it worked for them. Yeah.
18:44
This is local news gold. I have this long standing test that if you have a gadget that makes the local news, you've done something right in your story and many, many times. Those gadgets are all silly. Like the smart toothbrushes are all silly. But, like, it is coherent for a local news segment. Like, it's a toothbrush that measures your blah, blah, blahs. I'm like, this is all nonsense. Yeah, Thermostat, perfect local news gadget.
19:32
A hundred percent.
19:54
It's a thermostat, but you can control it from your phone. Like, no. No further questions. Like, put it on the news. And they got every ounce of that coverage that you can get.
19:55
Yeah. Can I just play you one really delightful clip? This is from Bloomberg right around that time. Make it engaging. Make it sexy.
20:03
A sexy thermostat?
20:10
Is that even possible?
20:11
But former Apple executives who designed the
20:13
ipod think they've done. There's over 150 million residential thermostats in the United States. They sell about 10 million a year. Despite having no innovation, the products are ugly. Surely we could do a lot better. We want to take our ipod experience and really apply it to the space so you can see the point.
20:15
Yeah.
20:30
This is all the greatest hits right there. Right The. There's the. There's a slide with all the ugly thermostats. That's pure Apple. There's the ipod reference. That's pure Apple. There's make it sexy, which I don't know if Steve Jobs would have said that, but he probably did at some point or another. But, like, that was. That was the vibe. Like a Sexy thermostat was the whole story of Nest at the very beginning, and it really worked for them. And like, looking at the piece of hardware now, right, like, if, if. If you haven't seen one of these, you should. Well, they're, they're lovely, but it's basically. Jen, I wonder if you can just describe this thing as a piece of hardware. Like, it's fundamentally just a big, heavy, round hockey puck with a screen in the middle.
20:30
You did a good job there. And it is. And it's. The heft is actually one of the. One of the features that really kind of stands out because most thermostats are just cheap plastic and they feel like throwaway, whereas this feels like something that's going to last. And I think when you're controlling, as I said, one of the most expensive systems in your home and controlling one of the most expensive expenses of your home, the energy use, you know, having something that feels solid and well made was a real win. It's also. It's not a touchscreen, which I think is great as well, because having tested many touchscreens on home appliances over the years, when the touchscreen stops working, you are sol. And that is, again, not something you want to have to deal with on a old. On something that's controlling an important part of your home. Instead, it's the press. So it has. And it has so much physical and tactile interaction. So this has got this beautiful metallic ring that actually twists as you turn it. And then the other really fun thing was the screen shows different colors, so it would show blue when it was cooling and it shows orange when it's heating. So you have this visual interaction that you can see from anywhere in the house. And big numbers. It shows the internal temperature and the target temperature in large numbers on the screen. So you're able to see at a glance what's happening with the heating and cooling. The hardware here just tells you what you need to do. And I think that's, you know, that's a design achievement that they really excelled at.
21:11
Yeah.
22:42
Neil, there was this really funny moment in your story that you wrote about NEST at the very beginning where you're sort of explaining the thing in context of conversation with Tony and you're like, it has all these nice new things. It looks way better, it has a screen, but it fundamentally still looks like a thermostat. And then immediately Tony butts in and is like, no, no, no, no, no. Tony seems to hate that comparison. He's like, absolutely. Under no circumstances does this Thing look like a. The. Like, he seems to. It acts like a thermostat. But it seems very important to Nest that they wanted to build something sort of unrecognizable in a good way.
22:42
But it looks like the original Honeywell thermostat. That's. I mean, it just got that inspiration from there. And then that's why they got sued. And then, interestingly, at CES, I want to say 2019, Honeywell took me down into the basement of CES and they had a little room, and they showed me their next smart thermostat, and it looked like a nest.
23:15
Oh, interesting.
23:37
It was beautiful. It looked. It was an upgraded version of their original round thermostat. They had gone the way of everyone else into plastics. And then Nest came out, and then they came back out. They were going to release this beautiful new round tactile thermostat. But then the pandemic came, and the thermostat never arrived. I've asked them about it multiple times, and, like, we had to abandon it, sadly.
23:38
I'm sorry. It took nine years for them to be like, we should be round.
24:00
Yeah. Cause they started round, then they went, squ. Rectangle. This came out.
24:05
That's horrible.
24:10
And then. And they sued Nest.
24:11
Yep.
24:12
And then they eventually went to go round and then didn't, and now they've come out square again.
24:13
Yeah.
24:19
So we'll. We'll.
24:20
We'll come back to the sue, but the. Almost immediately, Honeywell sues Nest for a bunch of patent infringements and a bunch of. Honeywell's argument and. And explanation for why it's suing Nest is, oh, we've. We've built all of this stuff. We have all of this technology. We've patented all of it, and most of it never, ever, ever launched from anyone at Honeywell.
24:20
Ever.
24:39
Yeah, it's. It's just. And like, for years, nest's response to this lawsuit was basically like, no, you didn't. None of this is real. Your patents are nonsense.
24:39
I mean, this is the danger of the monopoly. Yeah. Right. Honeywell was making however much money selling every single thermostat in the country. No one is upgrading. This is not their business. Yeah. And Nest comes out, they take 1% of market share. Honeywell's like, wait, look at all the technology we patented. So no one else could use it. They immediately had to get better. Right. And you can see a little bit of competition, open that market up. But I think, again, Nest looked at that Honeywell lawsuit as the ultimate validation.
24:50
Totally. I Think it was the best thing that happened to them?
25:17
Absolutely. They end up not settling this lawsuit, by the way, until 2016, after which Nest was a Google company. And I'm guessing Google just had less interest in fighting this fight. In the same way that, like, you definitely think Tony would have happily just run this thing to ground.
25:19
Yep.
25:32
Like, nobody would have wanted to get up in court and talk and compare thermostats more than Tony would have the black cloth. But, okay, so this thing comes out. It's a huge hit. The reviews are great. Almost every review was the same thing, which is like, this thing is amazing. It was kind of annoying to install, like, over and over and over. And it seems like a bunch of them had Nest employees come to their house and help them install it, which is not a perfect representation of the real experience. But everybody is like, yeah, this stuff works. There are a couple of little wonky things it's not great at knowing when I'm home and away. Little bits of software that weren't quite worked out in the first model. But the two features that were the thing and were the thing everybody really latched onto were a. The. The routine learning that it would know when you were home and when you were away, it would learn how you liked the temperature during the day and how you liked it at night. And Tony promised so many different amounts of time for how long it would take. It was like, it was a week, it was 10 days, it was two weeks, it was a month. But it was basically, over time, this thing is supposed to get smarter and smarter about knowing how you like the energy use in your house to be and what you like the temperature to be, and it should just do it for you. And then the other one was that it would use all that information to also try and save you money. That it would. It was smart about when energy was cheap and expensive and when you were supposed to use it and when things could be off and it would make all this work. Did that. Did that stuff pan out with this first model? Like, did that. I actually have no memories of. I didn't have a Nest for a very long time after this. But, like, did it do those things in those early days?
25:33
Not. Well, no.
27:02
Okay.
27:03
The biggest issue was the home and away. It was. So originally it was tied to one person's phone, which caused issues if you left the house and there were other people still in it. I mean, there's a sensor in the thermostat. But if. Depending on where your thermostat is, if someone didn't walk past wasn't, you know, it didn't have enough inputs originally. Although they checked, they fixed that. They added more ways to input more. You could have family accounts so you could have more phones assigned. Nest Protect Wired became a sensor. They started to bring more, more pieces in to help. And that's, that's been the biggest struggle with the sort of the home and away feature, and that's the key feature for saving money, is when no one's there, we're going to set your thermostat back and that's how you save energy. I mean, that's the basic concept. But that and, and the other issue it had, again the thermostat was the main sensor. That's this little sensor in the front is pir. And it was using that to determine where you, if you were in the home. So if you were upstairs in your office and the thermostat was downstairs and for whatever reason the phone wasn't sending its location, you know, for some reason software doesn't always work as we know. You know, your system would shut off and you would be freezing or cold or warm or too warm. So there were definitely a lot of bugs that worked out. And then the learning, now the learning was incredibly finicky and a black box. You didn't know what it was doing right. You had very little control over it. You could go in and choose, which
27:04
is, by the way, another very appley thing. Sorry to interrupt, but it's just this kept occurring to me that it's like, oh, what you could do is just let you have a schedule. And Nest is like, no, no, no, no. To this day, we'll figure it out for you.
28:37
The Nest schedule interface is like, go away. It's torches and spikes. It does not want you in there.
28:48
No. And it's very well, the original on the Nest apple was almost impossible to change in the Google home app.
28:55
Yeah. It's like you're not smart enough to know when you leave for work in
29:02
the morning, we'll tell you, get out of here.
29:04
So you had to, so you had to rely on it. And I never felt like they really cracked it. And in fact, they kind of almost admitted to not cracking it. With the last thermostat that came out, which is the 4th gen, it now tells you whenever it's going to change your schedule, which it never used to do before. Interesting. And so you get a little warning saying, oh, we've adjusted your settings. I'm like, oh, ness, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want it to be 72 degrees in the middle of the night. Come on. So I'd go, I'd go in and fix it. But yeah, it's, it's, it was a really neat idea, but I don't think it really fit with most people's lifestyle and it did cause a lot of issues, I think.
29:08
So this cell was the learning, which is important. The idea that anyone's going to actually program a thermostat and even understand what it is that a thermostat does. That first honeymoon thermostat, the round one, deeply confused a lot of people about what it is a thermostat does. And they're confused. To this day, the temperature is not the temperature of the air blowing out the vents. It's the temperature your house will get to. And the temperature that comes out your vents is always the same. And people are to this day just brutally confused about this difference. And then they do not think about time in the same way. They just turn the thermostat up and down, which is all you want them to do. So the biggest program here. I'm sorry. So the big innovation here was understanding, okay, at night you might turn it down and we can get way ahead of that and we can cool your house down at night and we can start it earlier, we can blow the fan at certain times or we're aware of the outside temperature and we can manage all this energy use. But fundamentally all they were doing was turning the furnace on and off or turning the air on and off.
29:48
But at the right time.
30:49
But at the right time, compared to
30:50
when you go up and go, I'm cold. Crank it up and then, and then
30:51
turn it down again. Right. So people are using the thermostat the way they've always used it and the NEST is trying to back out this other complicated energy saving thing. So you see this mishmash of metaphors in people's minds, like, this is what I think the thermostat is doing. Here's what NEST knows it's actually doing. And then here's what we're going to tell you it's doing. And to solve all of this and to like back out of. You're going to spin the dial randomly because you have no idea what's actually happening to. Here's a. Will save you energy. They invested a ton into like machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think they hired, I believe her name was Yoki Matsuoka. She was like a MacArthur genius grant award winner from Google to run a Full AI division to figure out the
30:55
learning and like which for a startup in 2010, 2011 is a big thing to do.
31:42
It's a big thing to do for and to make the ipod of thermostats. Right. And their whole point was we, you're going to randomly spin this dial throughout the day and eventually you're going to stop because the house will always be the perfect temperature because the AI has figured it out and we're talking to your utility company to manage the use of energy in your area and do all the rates in this. You just, they just landed it. And we need AI, we need a MacArthur genius grant award winning AI researcher to solve that problem because it's so hard. And Google with all of its tensor processing units still is like, yeah, we can't figure that out. It's still too hard.
31:46
Yeah. Well this ends up being an important part of the whole thing too because I think the way they got away with selling a thermostat for $249 was by promising very loudly that it would pay for itself.
32:18
20% is what they said originally. 20% for your cooling.
32:28
And this causes one of the really funny problems that people had with the early nests, which is that the thing was a nag. Like it really, really, really wanted to save you money on energy, which is a good and noble goal, but it would be kind of a dick about it would. Basically people had this perception of like, why is my thermostat like judging my choices about temperatures? And so it took to learn how to basically reward good behavior rather than sort of punishing bad behavior.
32:32
Yeah.
32:59
And so they, they had this thing that had the little leaf when you were doing the most energy efficient thing. And it would try to be very clever in the background, but they're trying to balance all this stuff where they're like, we want to be automatic, we want to make you comfortable, but it's very important to us to save you energy and money. And that, that is like a foundational principle of this device. And I don't know that anyone has ever correctly tuned all of those things against each other. But the first nest super didn't. And it took them a while to figure out like, okay, how do we sort of coach you and give you information and tell you how much you're saving and why as opposed to just being like, turn the temperature down, you're wasting money, you monster.
32:59
Also, again, people have very specific reactions to specific temperature numbers. We all have a family member who can perceive the exact difference between 72 and 71. Oh yeah, that is, everybody has that family. Yes, it's my wife.
33:35
Our house is 72 degrees, 365 days a year. That's the solution by the way. Just never ever change the temperature.
33:52
Don't change it. Because it used to just, it would kind of bounce between a few degrees as well, which is to your point earlier. And like people would feel it.
33:58
You could feel it.
34:05
Yeah. And that really upset people. But the 20% thing was, was actually untrue. And they eventually walked it back. Like they launched at, at launch it was loudly proclaimed this is going to save you 20% on your heating and cooling bills, which is a significant amount of money. And then eventually they did studies and did studies and it was, they came to the conclusion it's 10 to 12 on heating and up to 15% on cooling, I think was what they came to. But what's interesting about that is if you compare that 10% figure, that is the amount the Department of Energy says you would save if you just installed a programmable thermostat and programmed it.
34:06
But it's. That second step remains the most important thing.
34:44
More than, Almost more than 50% of people with them with programmable thermostats had not programmed them.
34:48
I believe that.
34:54
So that was actually the key savings saving that you got from this device is it programmed itself in theory or you, if you, you had had the access to more easily program it using your phone or your computer rather than having to hit the little buttons on a, that interface.
34:55
Talk about a keep away interface.
35:14
Yeah, that was pretty cool.
35:15
You know those animals that turn bright red to keep like those thermostats, like stay away from this poison lurks behind these windows.
35:17
The little bubbles you had to kind of like slide up and down and like tiny little touch points. Yeah, it wasn't great, but yeah. So in theory this actually was going to save you as much money as a regular programmable thermostat according to all the research, if you just used it as a basic programmable thermostat.
35:24
But again, I think a big part of the reason this ends up not being a huge problem for Ness. And it's worth saying that for all of this, all of these issues, all of the wacky stuff it dealt with, this thing was a monster hit from day one. They essentially sold out. You couldn't find it anywhere for a long time. The lawsuit doesn't stop it. This thing is like a smash hit from the very beginning. People love it, but they're able to update it over time.
35:43
This is the other big promise.
36:06
Right. And I think they lived up to it for a long time. Like they cut off software updates for the first Nest in 2025. And I think we can argue whether 14 years of software support for a thermostat is good or bad. I think you can, you can land on either side of that and I think it's fair enough. But they did the thing right. Like they kept it alive for a long time. It got better over time. And this is one of the challenges of a device like this is like no one is going to buy a thermostat with like a two or three year shelf life.
36:08
No.
36:37
And particularly for a brand new startup that has not done it before, it's very hard to make a first product and then support it for 15 years. That's a big thing to ask for and a big thing to pull off. And I think Nest deserves a lot of credit for the fact that.
36:37
Let me just back off. Come on. They deserve credit for doing it because most companies just pull the trigger and whatever. This is a software controlled on off switch.
36:51
Yeah sure.
37:00
My the I when the Nest came out I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. I couldn't put one in but I put three in my parents house in Wisconsin.
37:01
Nice.
37:07
And they're still there. I was just at home and I'm basically singing if you don't know me by now to my parents thermostats because after 14 years that that thing hasn't figured out their schedule. Like I don't know what else there is to do.
37:08
Fair.
37:17
Nothing else can be done. The agree. Right. And it's just an on off switch. Like at its core it is just a very complicated on off switch.
37:17
Yes.
37:26
And the idea that they it's some big investment to continue providing software updates. Like maybe they should keep providing security updates. And that's not fair. After 14 years. Okay. You can have that conversation. But feature wise it needs to do the same thing it was doing on the first day. And I think they still will. It's not.
37:27
They're going to stop because they work entirely without the Internet. It which is. Which was a core design feature. I think that was very important. So you can, if you have one you can connect it to your thermostat, to your H Vac system and control it completely locally. But you just won't get any and
37:43
you can't use the app anymore. Which is fine because I never asked my parents to use a Google home app anyway.
38:00
Because you love your parents.
38:04
Yeah. I was like I Don't want you near this. And so one day we'll replace them. But that, it's that first step. It's the thing Jen is coming back to over and over again. Maybe you weren't gonna save more money than a regular programmable thermostat, but most people were never going to do that program it. And so there are three in that house. They have learned when my parents are in different parts of the house, they can just do that forever now. And that is probably fine. My parents schedule is not changing very much. It's just gonna be fine. The thing that they could not do in the beginning, which some of them can do now, is they didn't talk to each other very well.
38:05
No.
38:38
Right.
38:39
And so a lot of the people who are buying these thermostats were, they had big houses, right? They're, they're, they're early adopters of tech. They have money, they have big houses. And they realize that thermostats are fighting each other. And so this is another thing they just had to figure out over time, which is like one thermostat would be heating, another would be cooling. It's like you, that's not both on the Internet. You should figure this out. But eventually they figure that out too.
38:39
Yeah.
39:02
All right, so I think just this is more or less, I think where the story of the first one ends. They ship the second product a year later, they ship another Nest. Three years after that, the Nest protect comes out later. Well, all of that is for future episodes, but I do think the last bit of the story of this One is in 2013 when Google buys Nest.
39:03
And I think Tony will tell you that he made a mistake. Everyone should read Tony's book Build, which is half really smart management advice and half just absolutely dunking on Google's culture. And like chapter to chapter, you don't know which one you're going to get. And it is so much fun to read on both dimensions. But that's, I mean, that's where the story of this product and that company just comes to a screeching halt. And you can see all the ideas in here eventually show up in Google's home products and home ideas. And they. Right, if Google can just see the data in your house, they can do all the blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever they're going to do, but they don't have the discipline to finish the ideas. Which is just the most googly culture problem that you can have up against the Apple Hardware guy who says we're going to finish the ideas.
39:23
Right.
40:15
Again, it's a good book. I encourage everyone to read it. But it does seem like the promise of Nest came to an abrupt halt in a very specific way at the Google acquisition.
40:16
Yeah, that's what Grant Erickson had said to me is like, when we got to Google, there was so many competing, different areas, people, other branches of Google that were doing similar things to what we were doing. But there was no cross pollination. And whenever we tried to sort of push an idea forward, we would, you know, kind of get a little knocked back. Like, culture clash was a significant issue at that point. And they had also had drop cam at that point too. So there was like three different companies coming together and ultimately the roadmap kind of started to fall off the cliff. And the product line, sadly, because it really was and still is, I would say, the most this one of the strongest smart home devices and ecosystems that we have seen. It worked well, it's iterated well. It looks good. They created some compelling additional products in the ecosystem. But today, the Nest brand and smart home legacy has kind of become very watered down and lost a lot of that initial innovation and excitement, which is kind of sad.
40:26
Agreed.
41:42
Yeah, I do think that is actually the right place to end this story. But I have one other fun fact for you, which is that I found some indication in researching the acquisition, and you're right that Google had lots of ideas about, about data and about connecting people to the Internet and about how this might be in your home. And this is around the time of Google tv. So everybody is trying to figure out, like, how do we sort of get into your physical space and bring technology into that. But one other idea that Google also had was that maybe it could put ads on your Nest thermostat, and maybe
41:43
you would like that.
42:11
Of course.
42:12
And so that is. That's where it really all fell apart.
42:12
Of course.
42:15
So let's take one more break, and then we're gonna go back and we're gonna do the version history questions and try to figure out the legacy of this thing, including all of the ads on the Nest thermostat. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. It's time now for the eight version history questions, the eight questions we ask about every product to see if we can figure out its legacy. The first one is the time matrix, everybody's favorite completely normal concept. That makes perfect sense. So this chart's idea and time, was it the right idea at the right time, the wrong idea at the wrong time, or somewhere in between? Jen, I want you to go first. Where do we put the Nest thermostat on the time matrix?
42:16
Well, it's arguably the Kickstarter product for the Smart Home 2.0. The app controlled wireless smart home. And so from that perspective, I think it was definitely the right time. Like, it came just before the sort of the iPhone, the app control of the home kicked off. It was one of the original devices that made us realize, like, oh, we can control our homes from our phone. This is, like, amazing. And as we've discussed on previous episodes of Virgin History, Today, we're like, I
42:53
don't want to use my phone.
43:27
But then this was, like, amazing. And being able to do it from somewhere, you know, outside of your home, being able to adjust your thermostat remotely.
43:29
That's a good point.
43:39
Fantastic.
43:40
That's worth, like, underlining because it's so normal now.
43:40
Now. And that's.
43:44
But the idea that you could control your thermostat when you were not at your house was such an unbelievable killer app for this thing at the beginning that. Forget all the rest of this. I can. I can raise the temperature of my house before I get home was meaningful and new and exciting.
43:45
I have to find this. This is a total tangent. Kara Swisher once tweeted a screenshot of her screen time.
44:00
Okay.
44:06
And the number one app was Messages, and the number two app was Nest. And someone said, why are you in the Nest app? And her only response was, I like to change the temp.
44:06
It's the power. I mean, I feel like it's a little much to give Tony Fadal and Matt Rogers the concept of the thermostat. Like, the thermostat been around for a long time, and like you said, it's just an on, off switch. All they did was kind of put a nice package around it. So it sort of depends how you define the idea.
44:17
No, no, I'm. This is the upper left or the upper right quadrant all the way, right time. All the peg it in the corner.
44:36
I don't know, man. I. It depends on what you think you're doing. If you're Nest. Right. If the idea is we can build a better thermostat that saves you money on energy. Like, great. Right idea, right time. The technology was available. They could do the thing. They had the right experience. It was like, it was a perfect sort of amalgamation of things to make this happen. If you're trying to build your Trojan horse into the smart home, it was too early. I'm not sure the. Thermostat's the way to start. Yeah, I'm not sure it's the right idea or the right time if this is what you're trying to do.
44:43
Wait, let me make the case. I can make the case. Case.
45:13
Okay.
45:15
You brought up Google tv. This was the time of Apple TV as well. The dream of convergence in the living room the tech industry been chasing for 1000 years.
45:16
Digital Living room is a phrase that's coming up a lot on this season of Version.
45:25
Everybody wants this thing, right? We're going to put a PC in your living room. This is the dream we're going to get there. And they're all attacking the TV because it's a screen and they understand the screen and they're like, if that screen just ran Windows, we'd have it made. And consumers every single year were like, no, no, it's just that idea just never took.
45:28
Right.
45:47
The thermostat. Unloved, ugly. We can automate a thing that you have no interest in automating. We'll get 10 to 15% savings for free. Just because we know that if you automate this a little bit, you get 10 to 15% savings. And it's got a little radio in it that lets us establish a network in your house outside of your WI fi. It lets us do all the rest of the things. I don't know, that there's a better place to actually store.
45:48
Yeah. I mean, and, and no one had had that idea before. Like, it was like, oh, wow, this was right here all along. We could have. Yeah. And in that respect, it, it, I mean, it is a smart home. It's the center. It could have been the smart center of your smart home. It ended up just being a really good thermostat, which is good enough.
46:11
Right.
46:29
Like, I think, I think if you're Tony Fidel, you take that as a
46:29
victim, take that as a win. Yeah. All right.
46:31
We'll give it right idea, right time. I'm fine with it. I'm over it. Question number two. Was this peak anything? I have several to offer you.
46:33
Okay.
46:40
Was this peak thermostat? Is this. I'm serious. Is this first nest the best thermostat anybody's ever made?
46:40
No.
46:45
Purely as a thermostat. No, I think hardware wise, every nest after this was worse.
46:46
But the many Ecobees are better.
46:53
Cheaper. Yeah, there are probably better, but they're called ecobees.
46:55
It's not great.
46:59
I tell people I'll do ecobee.
46:59
Well, ecobee actually came first.
47:01
Yeah, the Ecobee will also remind you of this.
47:03
I believe that too.
47:07
But Peak is not first and best best. It's like the combination. Yeah.
47:08
I'm not saying peak thermostat. I'll give you Peak. A bunch of other type.
47:13
Yes, unquestionably, yes. No, Never, ever before or since has a thermostat been as cool as this was in 2011.
47:18
But in terms of.
47:24
No question.
47:25
No, that's true. But in terms of its functionality, I don't think it was peak.
47:26
You said peak thermostat.
47:29
I'm just asking questions. Was this. Was this Peak Tony Fitzgerald. Tony Fadell is like a big character in the history of the Verge, in the history of technology. I think this might have been Peak Tony. This is his shining moment in the sun.
47:32
Tony has to be fair. Tony has been an investor for many years now. He's not been trying to pull the cloth off a gadget in a long time. So Peak Tony as a product guy. Yeah. This was his moment as a product person. I think Tony has lived many lives since then, for sure.
47:48
I think he got his house in Top. Yeah, we're all happy for him. Did you guys have anything else?
48:05
Peak.
48:09
Anything?
48:10
I think it's absolutely Peak. What if all of the stuff became a smartphone app?
48:10
Oh, interesting, right?
48:15
We're the beginning of the App Store era. The idea that the apps on your phone can do more than just Internet stuff, that they're going to do stuff out in the world is just beginning. Like, this is the very beginning of Uber in a real way. And the idea that you can push a button on your phone and something will happen in the real world has not begun. Now. It's. We all just take it for granted. But the idea that I can change the temperature of my ass from a phone or that that thing should be a little smartphone unto itself. This is the peak of that era. Yeah. It has only. It has only been weird, bumpy ride ever since then.
48:17
All right, question number three. If you could time travel back and develop it yourself, we're putting you on the founding Nest team. Could you make this product more successful? What would you have told them that they didn't know at the time?
48:48
No one's going to figure out your weird radio ideas for about a decade.
48:58
Huh?
49:04
That's a good one. I would have told them, don't take the Google money.
49:06
Not well, absolutely don't take the Google money. I think that the thing I would have said is don't go after the smoke detector. Second, you need to come up with something as Useful. And the smoke detector is like, they're not supposed to be useful. If you are interacting with your smoke detector, something is horribly wrong. And so they, and they were expensive. And I, I think they would have gotten to a different place faster if their second product had had some obvious utility. And I, I think that's actually where they got a little sideways because they did need all the sensors and stuff. And I, they, I think they thought smoke detectors were ugly. I got the big story about smoke detectors being ugly. But if they had done something a little more useful with the second product, I think something else would have changed. I don't know that I have notes on the first one.
49:08
I don't have a ton either. Jen, do you have any?
49:57
I just, My pet peeve with all smart home products is don't put your logo on it. It's in my home.
49:58
It's a good one.
50:04
Take Nest off. Yeah, but they never would have because they wanted the recognition. But when you're putting something like this, I mean, thermostats. Old ones had Honeywell on. This wasn't like they were breaking a mold here, but they made something that looked good and stuck there, their name on it. And I didn't want, I wouldn't want that. But I, I, I don't have a lot of notes on the first one. I think they did a, a wonderful job for a first generation product. I just, if they didn't have Nest on the top, it'd be even better.
50:06
Yeah, that's fair. All right, question number four. Will youth ever make it cool again? Doesn't really apply to this one. I don't know that we're making thermostats for.
50:37
I need to change this one for the smart home.
50:44
I know.
50:46
The youth.
50:47
The youth.
50:47
There's no retro nostalgia for the original. You know what they're. There is a lot of nostalgia for the vibe of the tech industry in this period.
50:48
Yes.
50:55
We hear this loud and clear from our audience, from people from kids on the street. Just why isn't it fun anymore? And this was so fun. And I do think some of that will come back in some way.
50:56
Yeah, agreed. All right, question number five. What feature of this thing should every current version have?
51:08
Some of the features again? Yeah, right. They've just been stripping the features.
51:14
No, I'm putting the, the metal ring back. I think the actual physical control has gotten worse and worse and worse over time on almost every thermostat. And to me it's just like give me the stainless steel thing that I
51:17
can move around, totally. So the newest one has that tactile feel which they took away in the middle for a while, but it's not the same. It's not as heavy and it doesn't have that solid feel.
51:27
And I think actually that was one of Tony Fadal's best insights, was that actually, if we can make it feel good to use, that goes an enormous distance towards making this whole product work for people.
51:40
I do think it's the heft. It's absolutely the heft. There's something substantial about having this thing on their wall. That was fun. We have an old one, it was copper, and I just don't want to take it off the wall.
51:52
Yeah. I think there's a really interesting sort of ongoing question that Nest really starts about. Are these devices supposed to be statement pieces? And you've seen Google struggle with this Y. Is it supposed to be cool and loud and something you really notice and becomes a talking point in your house, or should it completely blend into the wall? And.
52:04
And then they made one that completely blended into the wall and.
52:24
And I think there are, you know, rational arguments on both sides of that debate, but this one is so loud and clear that it is supposed to be a statement piece. And Tony Fadal even talked about it. He's like, I want people to go to someone's house, see the thermostat, ask questions about the thermostat, and then go buy a thermostat. And the idea of going to someone's house and asking about their thermostat is so insane.
52:27
Our people asked us about the copper one. It was a third gen, and it was only. Only at one store that you could get a copper one. And we went and went. I think it was at Lowe's. We went to that store, we bought the copper one, and we put it in the wall, and everyone asked us about it for a year.
52:46
And it works. It is. If you can do that successfully, it winds up being very powerful. Three more questions. These are the version history hall of Fame questions. A product has to make it through all of these tests to get into the hall of Fame. And I have a note here in the outline that I've never noticed before that says, host gets final veto power.
52:59
All right, I reject this note.
53:16
Hall of Fam number one. Did this product do something truly new? I think this one's easy for the Nest. The answer is. The answer, in a bunch of ways, is yes.
53:18
Yep.
53:25
Yeah. You could almost pick any feature of Nest, and it was new at the time, except for ecobee I hear all of you. Don't email me.
53:26
Yeah, I mean, the first ecobee was like a jumble of wires and a
53:34
shoe of Internet connected. Was the. Was the key.
53:38
Even if all you do is what if thermostat. But nice. It passes this test.
53:41
Yeah, right.
53:45
Like, okay, question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad?
53:45
It was remarkably good.
53:50
Yeah.
53:51
You think, like, that's a, that's a. That's a big high bar. We talked about all the things that fell on its face trying to do.
53:51
The only reason we know about those things is because we knew the, the level it was. It set out to achieve and it, it eventually did some of it, but it, it was remarkably good in the sense that a bunch of people who had figured out a very complicated user interface for the ipod and the phone brought all of that skill to this device and they did the same thing. And then importantly, you knew when it was not doing the thing it was supposed to do so you could complain about it. And those are. That's not true of most products in this class.
53:56
Yeah, I think, I think it's core use case. Being able to take something that was very confusing and difficult for people to understand, programming a thermostat and making it easy either by doing it itself, sometimes not well, or by letting you use a phone to do it or a computer to do it. That was remarkable and very good. Like, that really helped. It helped people save energy, which is what its original goal was.
54:25
Why am I leaving this all fired up to buy a new H Vac? What's happening to me?
54:52
This might be the most expensive Virgin History episode we've ever made. All right, so we'll give it that one. It's two for two. Question number three. Did it change history? Is there a world before Nest and a world after Nest?
54:57
Absolutely. In my world, there is a before Nest smart home.
55:09
This one.
55:13
This one.
55:14
It was the first Internet connected smart device that caught the sort of attention of the tech press and the public. You know, it brought everything together. And it was like, oh, now we can use our phones to control our homes. And that was the beginning of the smart home that we're in today.
55:14
Do you agree with that?
55:31
It's a qualified yes only in the sense that. That it's an absolute yes. If Google hadn't ruined this company, and Google just ruined this company.
55:33
It is a really interesting thing because, like, I think the part of this question that I struggle with is like, this thing happens. There is immediately so much enthusiasm for the smart home Everybody gets really excited. Everybody sort of sees the possibility. Tony Fadal's a star, Matt Rogers is a star. Like this becomes a big thing and then it all kind of collapses all at once. And I think a big part of that is Google buys Nest and it just it all sort of of screeching into a wall. This is also when, you know, Alexa starts to really invest in the smart home. This is when Google Assistant starts to hit big. There's like a sense that this is going to happen and then none of it works the way it's supposed to and it all slows way down.
55:42
But it only happened because this came.
56:16
I think that's fair that that first run of investment, I think you probably can trace back to this thing.
56:19
Yeah, because it captured the imagination of the consumer and the take tech world and the general homeowner got excited because of the savings. It was one of the first time I feel like we were able to see a tech product sold to the mass consumer as this isn't just about being cool and new technology. This is actually going to help you save money and be a great addition to your home. So I do think it changed history.
56:24
All right. I came in thinking this one was a toss up. We've had some that are, I think obvious. One direction are like. But I feel good about it. It makes it into the hall of fame. Welcome to the hall of Fame. Tony Fadell, congratulations. This is the career accomplishment you've been waiting for. You finally reached. This is this moment. Now is peak.
56:53
Tony, Fidel, we are absolutely gonna have to do a follow up episode where Tony and Matt just tell us everything we got wrong about this story.
57:08
I love it. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you both for being here. This has been delightful. Jen gets to now take her many, many thermostats home. Thank you both for being on here. Thank you to everyone, everybody for watching and listening. If you want to support all of this, you can get all of our podcasts ad free. You can make sure that we get to keep buying old gadgets to make episodes about. Subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe thank you as always. We'll see you next time. Virgin History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffern and Joe Nebras. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Follow the dedicated Version History podcast feed to get every episode as soon as it arrives and you can also watch full video episodes on our new YouTube channel, VersionHistoryPodcast. And to support everything we do and get access to all of our podcasts, including this one. Ad free. Become a paid subscriber to the Verge. Thanks.
57:14