![]() ![]() Sometimes its software was clunky or convoluted, but it was ultimately more convenient than juggling multiple bars of hard-molded plastic just to watch a dang episode of ER. ![]() But for most people, the death of Harmony is the death of the smart remote era. High-end products from Crestron and such persist, if you’ve got a thousand dollars to spare. ![]() Amazon’s Fire Cube thinks your smart remote should be your voice, which like most things that involve a lot of yelling gets old pretty quickly. A couple of companies, most notably Caavo and Sevenhugs, are still trying to make variations on the smart remote work. You can still easily find a much more basic universal remote-for cheap-at a big-box electronics store. Universal remote buying guides, to the extent anyone produces them anymore, typically comprise various tiers of Logitech devices. A remote that you can program to execute a cascading sequence of actions-turn on the TV and the Blu-ray player and switch the input and start the movie-with the press of a single button. If anything, it’s surprising that Harmony lasted as long as it did.Īnd now that it’s gone? That’s pretty much it for the smart remote, at least in the way that Harmony embodied it: a single controller to rule them all, with its own interface and touchscreen and deep bank of devices burned into its digital brain. The writing has been on the wall, the floors, the ceiling, the sconces, you get it. ![]() Logitech hadn’t released a new Harmony device since April 2019, and CEO Bracken Darrell first suggested he might jettison the entire line six years before that. That last Friday’s announcement came as an unceremonious post in the Logitech support forums speaks to just how little the company has valued Harmony in recent years. Sent to that big charging cradle in the sky. It would sell off whatever stock remained and keep adding to its sprawling database of supported devices. A client had sent him word that the company was giving up on the product line and that it would no longer manufacture what had become the gold standard in remote controls. “They finally did it.”įor the past decade, Werthauer has run a repair store for Logitech Harmony remotes out of his home on Long Island. “Oh, shit,” he thought as he read the email on his phone. You might even be able to find it for a bit less elsewhere.Quin Werthauer was enjoying a cup of coffee in his kitchen when he got the news. People have been begging Logitech to fix those six home control buttons for YEARS on the Logitech help forum, but they get ignored. The Companion remote is a piece of garbage (it's basically the same as the Smart Control remote, but it has six extra buttons called "Home Control" that are intentionally crippled, meaning you probably wouldn't be able to use them for anything - and even if you had one of the few devices they work with, their functionality is still limited to only a few options which often make no sense. The first few pics show the Smart Control remote, but the fourth and fifth pics are of the Harmony Companion remote. It looks like it comes with a hub, but it's still WAY overpriced, and some of the pictures aren't even the same remote. That first link is literally the one I bought to add on to the hub that came with my Harmony Elite. ![]()
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