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Like I said, in general. You may well be a model citizen but for every one like you there'll be a few more who constantly dial it up, or pre-heat the house before they get home etc etc
If I'm out I don't adjust it, the thermostat takes charge. For those that like to tinker, the settings will be up and down like a yoyo, which is inefficient at the best of times. For those that don't like to tinker its going to work more or less like a dumb thermostat anyway.
Anyway, its a fair bit of waste (replaced hardware, energy usage (both smart thermostat itself plus server time etc)), for a very marginal improvement, and that's only 'if' you want energy savings. If you just want convenience than it is going to be wasteful, almost by definition.
Its hard to explain the benefits of a system to someone who doesn't understand how they work, so I will carry on enjoying the benefits and you can carry on living in the 1980`s.
How much energy did you use last December? how did that compare to November? did the weather have any effect on your energy use in either of these months? How does your energy use compare to your neighbours?
Nest gives me all of this information and helps me save money and energy.
The main difference for me is that when programming the smart thermostats you're saying what temperature you want when - not what time to start aiming for a new temperature. You don't need to know how long it takes to get there or fiddle about with setting it earlier when the weather gets colder - the thermostat knows how long your room/zone/house takes to warm up and knows what the temperature outside is likely to be. You just say you want this room at 20c at 7am and it fires up the heating whenever it needs to.
Leaving aside the petty insults trailwagger, if you take simon_g's example above, this is not very different to my honeywell digital thermostat which is standard with the boiler. Its programmable and does more or less whats described there, just from a slightly fiddly LCD box attached to a wall, rather than my phone. The main difference as I see it, is that the heating will come on sooner if its cold thus using more energy. The offset to that is that the house is warmer quicker. I suspect the majority of people will be in the warmer house camp as opposed to the save energy camp therefore more energy used.
And yes, I do know exactly how much energy I used in different periods of the year, my bills tell me and its not very difficult to work it out.
Some pretty email which tells you how virtuous you are really means very little.