We won't own almost anything the way we own our plungers.

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But the coming transformation is about more than ownership. It’s about attempting to take a way of thinking (and selling) from one technological world and apply it to another. It’s about making things “smart”—which means, in effect, making them function like our smartphones.

Sometimes that pitch is more explicit. When it announced its first wearable computer early this month, Apple never called its Watch a “smartwatch.” (Such a clunky title.) Instead, it was all too happy to compare it to the iPhone. That’s partly because the iPhone is the company’s marquee product, the one that millions have warm-fuzzies for—but it’s also because turning the watch into a zone of smartphone-dom is exactly what Apple hopes to do.

And make no mistake: The Apple Watch is indeed Smart. At base, smartness means it has a processing power onboard. It’s means it’s a little computer hooked up to a sensor or three and a networking node. A smart thing probably reports some fact of its condition or location, and an aspect of its state might be modifiable from afar.

Smartness often entails a whole ecosystem, too. Smart things can do more with software—which means they have an app store. And because they have a computer or storage onboard, smart things, too, need to be replaced at a decidedly un-plunger-like rate. “Smartness” implies a smartphone-like upgrade cycle.

This aspirational smartness is not just coming to watches. Any product that's worth more than a few bucks will have some intelligence and communication abilities embedded in it. Companies that exist today are trying to create smart umbrellas and smart crockpots.

Do you want a crockpot that has to be replaced at every few years—or at least that will be forever upgrading itself? Would apps change your mind?

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With smartness comes something else: hackability. If you have a computer, and it’s on the network, it can be breached by someone or something else. Build a smart ceiling fan and you have a ceiling fan that can be hacked.

This is the future that Kevin Meagher, the general manager of Lowe's SmartHomes initiative, is paid to think about. Talking to GigaOm this summer, he implied that the smarthome—even the smart air conditioner—will exist in a tremendously messy environment.

“The only way you can actually control [a] device or integrate it into your ecosystem is by actually going through the cloud-to-cloud. So, for example, whatever the device is is talking to the manufacturer or the vendor’s cloud platform, and then they are allowing you access to their cloud’s data," he said.

What this means: Most “smart-home” devices right now aren’t talking to each other directly over a local wifi network. Instead, they’re talking to enormous and centralized data centers, which are then talking to each other, which are then (finally) sending instructions back to different devices in your home.