From the opinions I've seen, the Joule seems to be more reliable than the Anova.
But it has its downside, too. There is no way to control it manually. That means that if the company ever closes down, or decides it no longer wants to continue to spend money on devices it sold years ago, that's the end of it. Without continually being updated, the app will stop working eventually, and I can no longer cook my food.
With the Anova, I can at least use it by pressing buttons on the device. No need for wifi or an app.
In fact, the whole IoT thing is a really, really bad idea. Besides people getting their computers hacked by their light bulbs (as was the case with both
Philips and
Nest, among
many other IoT devices), there are other issues.
To name one, when was the last time I felt the need to control my dishwasher while I was in the office? Never even once in the past 30 years, of course. Yet, dishwashers now come with wifi and an app. (I know, I bought a dishwasher last week. But not one with wifi.) These apps for appliances are solutions in search of a problem. And the only thing they achieve is needlessly making our lives more complicated.
Just listen to the hours of frustration of Anova users trying to get it to connect to their network. Do you have a space or other unusual character in your wifi password? Too bad: you'll have to change the wifi password. Are you running 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks with the same SSID? Too bad: you'll have to rename one of them, or turn one of them off. Otherwise the Anova won't work.
Another serious problem are long-lived devices, such as refrigerators, ovens, cook tops, washing machines, and so on. They often last for 20 years or more. There is a really serious economic problem here: the manufacturer gets money when they sell me a device, but doesn't get money for keeping it up to date. In other words, there is zero incentive for the manufacturer to do the right thing by the customer. In fact, there is an incentive to do the
wrong thing by the customer: by no longer updating an older device, they coerce people into buying a newer one.
If you are one of the people who bought a refrigerator with a built-in screen and internet browser back in the heyday of the web madness, have you tried browsing the web with it recently? It will not work. At all.
There are also hardware standards to consider. We have had several major wifi standards, with more coming every few years. What are my chances that, fifteen years from now, my then-new wifi router will still be able to speak the language that is expected by my IoT devices? A language that is 15 years out of date? Or that it even even has a radio that supports a by-then long obsolete frequency? Or that it still supports the authentication protocol that the device wants to use, even though we don't use that protocol anymore because we found it to be insecure?
Do you have enough technical knowledge to know how to set up virtual private networks that prevent devices from talking to each other, so you can isolate each IoT device in its own network and not have it attack your phone or PC? Do you know how to be sure that a device doesn't change radio frequencies behind your back, or puts the interface into promiscuous mode and listens to every packet that flies past?
Do any of these words even make sense to you? If they don't, be ready to get hacked.
Companies such as Miele are really good at making dishwashers and washing machines. It's their business, and they've been at it for a long time. Conversely, it is pretty much certain that they are really bad at writing secure networking software. Because that has never been their business. So the code gets outsourced to the lowest bidder, and the people writing the code can't even program their way out of a brown paper bag. (I'm not making this up. Serious security breaches caused by that kind of incompetence number in the many thousands.)
As far as I am concerned, no device that cannot be operated without a wifi connection will ever enter my home, period. And no device that does not allow me to disable its wifi interface (mechanically, if need be) will ever enter my home either.
I work as a networking expert for a major security company, which is why I will not have any IoT anything.
