Why do you say it's unusable? Our Nest thermostat seems to be working fine as a normal (offline) thermostat. I don't see a reason to replace it.

I'm not even sure when I would want a network-enabled thermostat. We inherited it from the previous owners.

Google disabled cloud services, and therefore the app. The remote control features were a key reason many bought these.

Can you edit schedules directly on the thermostat? From what I recall, much of the functionality required the app. That can’t be used now.

If you’re only using it as an analog dial to set the temperature, you won’t miss anything. However the majority of functionality is now gone from the devices.

I liked mine because my home/away schedule isn’t “routine”. It was much easier to have it known when we left the house and it would automatically turn down, and I could warm the place up when we were headed home which is great when it’s below freezing out.

Edit to mention that I was out of town one winter and my thermostat gave me an alert that my apartment had reached 40F! With my cats in there and a blizzard happening while I was four states away, I was able to ask a friend to walk over and check it out. Turns out my balcony doors had blown open during the storm, thankfully my cats wanted nothing to do with the snowy outside but I can’t imagine if they had been in that situation for the 3-4 days it would be before I got home.

It's an Internet connected device that will never receive updates and has none of the features that justify its existence above a $20 dumb thermostat. If you inherited it and don't care about the features and never used it anyway, I'm not sure why you'd care either way.

If you'd bought it for hundreds of dollars for the things it promised to do, you'd probably be much more excited to learn that you at least aren't stuck with a device that was made intentionally dumb by the manufacturer. They're perfectly capable of doing what they were designed to do!

Mostly I can fiddle with it from my bed rather than going downstairs.