Full restore? Or start from scratch?

Today I want to tell you about something that happened to me a few days ago at the Apple Store in La Vaguada, Madrid. Basically, I went there with my iPhone 16 Pro Max because it was getting too hot… and I came out with one of those lessons in humility that make you go to bed knowing one more thing than you did before, which has made me rethink a few things about my Home Automation network.

My iPhone runs hot

saidwritten, a few days ago I booked an appointment at the Apple Store in La Vaguada, Madrid, because my iPhone was getting really hot. Those of you who also listen to me on the Corriendo a NY podcast from EmilcarFM can skip this part since I mentioned it on yesterday’s episode, with fewer technical details, but anyway… The thing is, I hadn’t really noticed that my iPhone was getting hotter than usual. I knew it warmed up from time to time, but I hadn’t thought much of it, until a few days ago I was having a beer and handed it to my daughter, and she told me she didn’t want my phone because it was too hot to hold. Granted, I do carry it without a case, so you’re touching the titanium directly, which is supposed to ‘draw’ heat away from the phone. If I had a case on it, I might not have noticed this at all, but anyway. Since I have Apple Care+, I called Apple and booked an appointment at the Genius Bar to get it diagnosed. They told me that if there was a problem, they’d swap it out right there on the spot, as usual—it’s happened to me a few times before with other models. So, when I got there, the Genius helping me said it was indeed running very hot, that they’d run a diagnostic, and asked if I’d restored it. I told him no, that for years I’d been carrying everything over from OS to OS and from iPhone to iPhone… that the thought of restoring it from scratch fills me with dread. But the guy told me we were going to do it right then and there, and that it’s something that happens sometimes, both when moving from one phone to another and when updating OS versions without a full restore… that there are processes that get stuck somewhere along the way and there’s no way to clean them up except with a restore from scratch… it sounded to me like the classic «have you tried turning it off and on again?», but hey, since I was already there with my daughter, I told him it wouldn’t hurt to try, we wiped it, and while it was setting back up we went down to grab a snack at Starbucks. Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with the whole restore process—I’ve got the phone back to how it was, but with way fewer apps, because you take the chance to install only the apps you actually need right now, not the ones you’ve used once or the «just in case I climb Everest» apps we’ve talked about before… and magically, the phone no longer overheats and the battery lasts way longer. I promise you, it doesn’t heat up with my everyday apps, which are the same ones as before, and the battery lasts much longer than it used to, since that heat was making the processor perform worse, forcing it to lean on the CPU more and drain more battery. Anyway, since the process had worked so well, I did the same thing with the Apple Watch and did a full restore. It’s true the Apple Watch sets up and reinstalls much faster since you have fewer apps… and in one afternoon I had it up and running again, and the thing is, now it feels smoother and the battery lasts longer. I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect given how well the iPhone turned out, but I’m happy. I’m not going to add it to Todoist to remind me to repeat this process every 3 months though, no way—reinstalling every app and setting them all up again is a huge pain. Some save their config to iCloud, Apple’s cloud, but in other cases you have to configure everything from scratch.

Is it worth wiping automations and starting fresh in Home Automation?

And this got me thinking… would it be worth doing the same thing in our home automation setup? As you know, I use both Home Assistant and HomeKit, and I have duplicate automations in both. Right now they’re all disabled in Home Assistant, but if HomeKit ever fails, I disable them in HomeKit and cling to Home Assistant for dear life… until the next screw-up from the Home Assistant folks, at which point I think they’re sketchy and that it’s reckless not to have a high-availability home automation setup, and I go back to the Home app and HomeKit. Earlier this year we had a couple of serious problems with Home Assistant: one due to a zigbee2mqtt update that didn’t enable the legacy option by default, and we woke up that day to find all our zigbee devices disconnected… and another due to a screw-up of my own, where I accidentally banned every device on my zigbee network that wasn’t a bulb… and there was no way to ever unban them. I migrated to ZHA and everyone was happy, but I had a few hours of panic there. However, HomeKit hasn’t failed in a very long time. It’s true there are things you can’t easily do from HomeKit, at least not from the Home app, so sometimes you have to resort to complex Shortcuts or tools like Controller for HomeKit, which we’ve talked about a thousand times… but it doesn’t fail. It’s reached a point of super robust maturity. I’m planning to talk to you next week about Matter, so that those of you not quite up to speed can see a bit where the standard is heading and whether it’s worth buying Matter-compatible devices right now, but with the arrival of Matter devices on the market, HomeKit has suddenly gained the ability to control a vacuum from the Home app. I’ll tell you more about that in a few days too—I have an article half-written. The point is, this push from Matter has meant we now have way more devices supported by HomeKit than before, and on top of that, you don’t need to install a gazillion bridges. It’s true the automations side of things hasn’t changed… but I’ll also say that for 95% of HomeKit users, the automations you can create from the Home app are more than enough to make the house run itself. These past few days I’ve been in Stuttgart at a conference on OT device cybersecurity, and in one of the talks they discussed the interior of vehicles, what’s called the cockpit, and it made me laugh how the speaker said that, a few years ago, if you were hot inside the car, you had to turn on the AC yourself. Many years later, you’d pick a temperature and, if it got warmer, the car would turn on the AC… if it got colder, it would turn on the heating, but it would always keep the same temperature. And they mentioned that in the future, with AI making its way into cars, the car will be able to see the temperature rising inside because the sun is hitting the left side, and it’ll be able to make the decision to turn on the AC itself… Is that the future? We’ve been doing that ourselves for 10 years with a few conditions, no artificial intelligence needed. It’s true that integrating ChatGPT via the API into Home Assistant is really cool, and you can say things like «Hey Jarvis, if the kids are home and it’s cold, turn up the heating»… and yeah, that’s great and convenient, but at the end of the day it’s just like when my wife tells me to do something—there’s no intelligence on my part, all I’m doing is interpreting her natural language and executing it, right? What we’re after is for the house to know the kids are home and turn up the heating on its own. Is that intelligence? Not really, but hey, who am I to say now that we’re using the term «artificial intelligence» loosely and carelessly. But what I wanted to tell you is that, after so many years tinkering with HomeKit and Home Assistant setups. After the thousand times I’ve created automations, installed devices that I later removed, the changes both systems have gone through, the new standards that tell you how to name your devices so you can call on them conveniently and optimally without having to do what Emilcar used to say years ago—»Hey Siri, turn on duckling»—which is how he referred to a bulb because he had no better way to name it without duplicating the name of another identical bulb… after all the plugins we’ve tried in Home Assistant, what we now know about using MQTT queues instead of the device already built into the system, the option of installing MariaSQL in Home Assistant instead of using the slower local database engine… wouldn’t it be a good idea to restore everything from scratch with a clean install and do it all right from the ground up? I’m sure it would work even better than it does now. As a good IT guy, you have no idea how much it bugs me to see a log full of errors, even if they’re not severe or critical ones—having warnings in a log gives me hives… and I’m sure that if I start a clean install from scratch and put some love and time into it, I could end up with a PER FECT setup, both in HomeKit and Home Assistant, with no errors, no warnings, nothing… but the thing is, right now it’s working without any issues—is it worth it? What do you think?