Apple's Smart Home Plans, iOS 18.3 Changes, & xBloom Smart Coffee Maker
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Welcome, everybody, to another exciting, life-changing, holiday-filled episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, as always, your host, Andrew O'Hara, joining me this week once again. It is Wes Hilliard. How you doing, man? Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, yeah. It's a fun holiday week and a whole lot to talk about, even though, for some reason, nobody ever stops working anymore. It's just year-round all the time. Clearly, clearly. I know. And it is Christmas Eve Eve.

And here we are, putting out an episode of the podcast. We've got stuff to talk about. We've got Shopify to tell, like all these things. So before we get into the actual news news, I did have a piece run last week that I was very excited about that I feel like all of you would be somewhat interested in. So if you want to check it out, I have both the video and the article link. So basically, I sum up all...

All of Apple's smart home plans. I don't know if you got a chance to watch this or read this, Wes, but I feel like I'm on to something with everything that Apple has going on between HomePods, Apple TVs, it's Apple intelligence stuff, this smart display, the camera.

All of it I kind of put into a timeline of what's realistic, how everything works together, how it ties in with matter, the red, everything. It all seems like it makes sense or I have been thinking about smart home too much and I am scribbling this on the wall with Cran. I'm not quite sure, but let me know what you think, Wes, and have anyone else send in feedback as well. We should get you one of those –

walls like charlie day and uh oh yeah yeah no uh it all makes sense i think it it's it's uh realistic to think that this is all pretty well connected it apple's plans to get the new matter certifications going and get these uh little devices out and get apple intelligence in the home it all lines up so we'll see how it works out if they can execute

We'll see. So, yeah, links in the show notes if you want to check those out. So going into the news, we did have those releases coming out. So two different things that are relevant to us in the smart home world. We had our first betas of the .3 series, right? So iOS 18.3, tvOS 18.3, as well as the rest of them. So what we're going to care about is, one, robotic vacuum cleaners are apparent. They're not like they're.

They're basically in 18.3. So this was found on a code level. So there's nothing user facing yet, but it was only the first beta. There's also nothing really to see like visually until you had a robotic vacuum cleaner and there are none yet, but this is at least a good sign. Once this is out, right? Once 18.3 is out, I see no reason why everyone else can't just say like,

Here's our vacuums. So we'll see. And you guys know I'm going to be pressing people at CES like, hey, where is this? Why isn't MatterSupport here from all these manufacturers? I'm curious. How does this work? Is it an on-off switch? Can you select a room for it to clean? Is there an automation system? Is it on-off?

From what I saw in terms of the MatterCode, like what they supported, was it is on and off. So basically just go and come back. There is a return to dock button you'll have. There is a mode switch, so you can switch between like mop, vacuum, mop and vacuum. So that is an option. But you can't do rooms. That is the problem. And what I think they run into is like you have rooms that you designate in Apple Home, but you...

in terms of what you have in like the manufacturer's cleaning app, you also have rooms, but they're not tied like their physical rooms. Cause they're like mapped in 3d space. So how do you tie them to that? That's, that's the hard part is how you tie those like physical 3d scans to the rooms in Apple home. And right now there is no way of doing that. So yeah, I think it's always a possibility going forward. Yeah. I think Apple needs to kind of pull a home kick secure video system here and

and have the vacuums able to kind of perform operations inside of the whole map. Now, how that ties into matter and everything else, who knows? But there's got to be a smart way to do this. I agree. Well, Sigmund Judge also pointed this out. So TVS 18.3 is prepping for California law AB 2426. Now, if you don't know what that is, because I didn't know what that was, here's what it is. When you purchase...

access to this item. You can permanently download it to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. Once downloaded, you can access this without an internet connection, and Apple can't remove it from your device. If you purchase this from Apple TV app on your Apple TV, smart TVs, or other streaming services, you can't download it on those devices, but you can easily download it on a compatible device. So this is trying to prevent people who are buying digital goods from losing access to them in any way. And I've had this before. I don't know if you've had this, Wes, but

It's one of the things that makes me very nervous about digital media. I love digital media. I love having a massive library of movies and TV shows that I can stream across all my devices and download them at will. All of those are great things. But I had bought Kingsman, the original Kingsman movie, and all of a sudden it was gone. It said I had to rebuy it. And I actually reached out to Apple, and they're like, oh, okay.

Well, it's no longer available. I'm like, no, it definitely is available, but it's saying I have to buy it again. And they had already bought it. They're like, oh, well, the studio must have uploaded a new version of it, which removed your access and you can't have access again because it's a new version. So you'll have to rebuy it. I'm like, you bought a license to one version. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, what kind of heck is that? Like a studio can just.

change the movie, which is fine if you want to be like George Lucas and upload a new version with new digital effects in Star Wars, and then no one has access anymore. But it was the same movie, and I just now didn't have access to it. And it was a whole thing, and I never understood how...

I understand on a fundamental level, like, oh, you're buying a license and that stuff. But it just seems so incredibly wrong that even something like that, which seems more of like an error than anything, and forced to buy a movie again. So something like this is locking that in a little bit. It hasn't happened to me in like a decade. I remember Anchorman disappearing randomly at one point, having to buy it again. But that was more of a dispute with rights holders. But yeah.

This whole thing with owning digital content is weird. We're getting into finally, I don't know why it took so long, but with PlayStation and other things, we're finally getting into this digital era where everything you buy is digital. I haven't bought a physical movie since 2014. I haven't bought a physical... I know you're a gamer. What do you do for PlayStation games or anything? Even then, PS4, all digital. We're talking 2014, 2015. I just made the call of

I'm just going to get big enough storage for local, for video games, and I'm just going to use the cloud for – I dedicated – that's when I switched to Apple. I said I'm just going to go all in on iTunes and buy everything on iTunes and not have to worry about digital stores. We also had that Movies Everywhere system installed.

uh, that let you import stuff from voodoo and other things if you had other, uh, clients. So it was kind of a golden era of this, even though it was the very beginning of it, it allowed you, it, everyone was interop interoperability kind of thing very well. And, uh,

I was excited to get into it and it worked out fine because all of those movies like a year later got upgraded to 4K for free. And then now they're all upgraded to 3D for free. And my PlayStation library still exists. If I go plug in my PS4 today, I can go re-download all the games I owned on it. My PS3 still has all of the digital games that I owned on it.

Yeah, sorry. I guess that would have been about the time for PS3 as well. So PS3 was the last console I bought physical discs for, and it's pretty wild. I did spring for the disc version of the PS5, partially because I wanted the option to sell my old discs when I was done with a game. Because when you're digital, you're stuck with it. Yeah, you keep it forever. Yeah.

And it seemed like, oh, this just seems like kind of a scam. You can't let people borrow it either, which is annoying. Yeah. That's another really big thing is being able to trade games with people. Like there was a lot of that – I don't know. There was that community and sharing. And then again, I could go off on a whole tangent about how there's a lack of couch co-op game these days. Right. Like –

Honestly, that's all I want to play. And now every single game, especially like first-person shooters and stuff like that, they've all transitioned to like online and that's it. So if we want to do anything, my friend has to like bring his PlayStation over to our house and set up a second TV so we can play together. And that just feels ridiculous. Like people don't want to – aren't in the same spaces anymore. It's what Nintendo does. Yeah, we're far adrift from where we were.

I think this is cool. I think the law makes sense. It's not really – other companies might be doing this. Apple hasn't really done a bad job here. I've been able to download my stuff from iTunes to a local hard drive and go offline for months and watch whatever I want. So luckily, though, codifying it means that it can't change in the future, and that's smart. Agreed.

Well, in terms of things that Apple should do that they're not is tiers, like user tiers for the home. And this is something that Google is testing out. So basically, they have created new tiers for their smart home users. So a user in a home can be an admin or they can be a member.

And you can actually control each of those members in terms of what they have access to. And this is something we have talked about that Apple has needed for a long time, especially just when it comes to children. How much control do you want to give children over your home? And now that we're giving...

We're having more devices between vacuums and chargers. So if you, Oh, you can have your kid be able to turn on the starlight projector in their room, but also they can control your EV. Like there should be a level here of separating these things out. And right now there's really not. So Google is testing this. This was announced in like November or something. And now it's starting to roll out. Apple should absolutely implement this in Apple home. And maybe the fact that we're seeing it start to roll out in other homes is

is more likely they will see it come to Apple sooner rather than later. I wonder, have you thought of trying guest users instead? So invite your child as a guest to your home, and that way, yeah, you can, because then you can pick and choose what they have access to and even give it time limits.

Yes and no. So first off, I don't know how that works because like my child is a member of the family, like in terms of like the Apple accounts go. So that's already sharing with them like the home. So I don't know how I could remove access to the home, but then also re-invite them as a guest. So I don't know how that would play in terms of like controls. But beyond that. We have my mom on my Apple family.

And she has some smart stuff, right? A smart lock and a camera. And she's not part of my home. So, uh, I have to specifically invite her to be in my home, but I also, she has shared with me guest access to her door lock so I can access her home whenever I need to. And that work that's worked out fine so far. I, and I, maybe I, it seems to work. Uh, I always have access to that lock if I need access to it. I, I,

I feel like I need to go into that and poke around because if I can just go in and say, give me this light, give me this lock, and just granularly add it, I think this would be the solution for now. That's true. But the problem is guest access only applies to certain controls. That's the problem. Like you can't do lights. Yeah. You can only do like locks and security devices. So an alarm, a door lock, a garage. But you can't turn on the lights or control the HVAC. So it's like Apple has started this, but they haven't.

finished it right so maybe maybe next year man we've had a lot we're we're pouring a lot of stuff into that 2025 basket i hope that basket's not getting too full

Okay, we have more news than a quick review to get through today. But before we get to it, let's take a break and thank our sponsor for the episode. It is Shopify. Shopify has come in so clutch this holiday season. It is hard to keep track of all the gifts that I have purchased for my wife, for my kid, for family members, all that kind of stuff. And Shopify makes it so easy. I am not kidding. I have like lived in the shop app recently because it tracks all of my orders. So any website that supports Shopify, I can track in the shop app.

So I'm going out and buying little cards for my son's Yodo player. I am buying...

Faith's Clothes from Everyday California, I am buying Sheets for Our Bed, all of these different sites, and then they all track in the Shop app. On top of that, they've all basically shown up in Apple Wallet as well. So it's like one of the few ways that you can actually track things in Apple Wallet, which is super duper handy. It also just makes me feel more secure when I'm buying through any of these websites. I know that it is a trustworthy website, at least in terms of my payment.

Who knows how good the product will be, but I know that my payment is secure. I'm not giving anything to that merchant. I'm giving it to Shopify, who is trusted, safe, encrypted, everything like that. When you check out through a website that supports ShopPay or Shopify, you have ShopPay, you have Apple Pay, you have Google Pay, you've got PayLater, all of these different things that you can use to pay that make that checkout process easy.

which is exactly why you want that's why shopify has an incredibly converting cart checkout system compared to a lot of the competitors out there i could go on and on about shopify i also just jumping into the shop app again i've gotten so when you jump into the shop app to track your orders it also has all these different recommendations based on what you've purchased and what you might like i think it's even like using ai to help populate these things

It got me. Like, I was shopping over the holidays. I'm like, oh, look at that. This is really cool. And now we have a Pura air filter in our house. And I also, literally before the episode, I've been dying to try Fly by Jing, the, like, that...

like chili crisp, Asian chili crisp stuff. And there's like a coupon for it right here. I'm like, oh, I just follow that, hit a heart on it, and then I can check out right through like the shop app and finally try this stuff. So it is so easy to try. And you have all these other brands that I know, like Norlin, which has amazing glassware that I use for like my whiskey and stuff. There is...

Nomad is in here. Kaleidoscope built James brand fellow, which coffee makers will come back to those. But all of these brands are using Shopify to help grow their business, find new customers and make that ordering process easier. So let's go ahead, sum it up, put a bow on it, upgrade your business and get the same checkout that all of these different brands use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash home kit, all lowercase, go to shopify.com slash home kit to upgrade your selling today.

Shopify.com slash HomeKit. So in the news next up...

I think this is pretty cool. Elevation Lab comes out with some very neat, random niche gadgets for Apple users. This is called Time Capsule, which, funny enough, is one of Apple's discontinued products. But this is called Time Capsule for AirTag. And it's an enclosure, like a watertight enclosure for your AirTag. You remove the metal back from it.

And you put it into this, which has a pair of AAA batteries that'll give your AirTag a 10-year battery life. Right. Smart. How does no one else think of this? It's really cool. You have to be really careful which batteries you buy for this because alkaline batteries like that generally have a lifespan of four to five years. So you want to make sure you buy some real good ones. But 10 years, I mean, as long as the batteries work.

10 years is plausible. That's doable. It's a really good idea. Maybe then you would find your keys. Okay. You're just going to keep a quick-forward soul in that wound. Every single week until I find those keys. Well, my lease is coming up here soon, so I have to find them within a few months or I am in trouble. My goodness.

Next up in the news, Eufy has a new camera out. So this is called the E30, I believe. It is a 4K camera, has 360 degrees of rotation, and it also tilts up and down by 75 degrees. It supports not only Apple Home, but it supports HomeKit Secure Video as well. Plus, it has a micro SD card slot on board for local storage.

It's got infrared lights, so you have color night vision and can detect if you pair it with a home base, one of Eufy's other products, you can get up to 16 terabytes of local storage when you have that thing connected. And it's only $70. This is a pretty solid. This is a really solid option. Yeah.

The only other one that I would typically recommend that was like my go-to recommendation was the Ecobee because it also supported HSV and it was a very, very good price compared to a lot of the competition. But now with the rotation, 4K resolution, and local storage for $70, this is a really good option. If it's $70, I'm assuming this is an indoor camera, correct? Yes, indoor camera.

Yeah, that's where the water tightness and stuff usually raises that price significantly. But that's still a really good deal for all the specs you're getting, especially if you need a good indoor camera. Absolutely. The only downside to it at all is Eufy did have those security issues, which they are adamant that they have patched and taken care of. But as long as you are aware of that and understand their promises and how much you trust Eufy after that,

This is a super solid camera to pick up for a home kit home. Okay, Wes, how much do you like coffee? Are you like a yes coffee, no coffee, or a love coffee? I like coffee. I don't need it. I'm not an addict, so I don't wake up and just pour a cup every day. But no, I never say no to a cup. Being in the military for 10 years, you get used to some very specific flavors of coffee, good or bad.

Okay, well, I am a huge coffee fan. I definitely don't need it, but I also love it. I really like coffee, and I have spent a lot of money on coffee.

machines and gadgets over the years. And this is possibly my favorite one yet. So I don't know if you've Googled it because it was in our show notes, but this is the X Bloom Coffee Maker, right? And let me tell you about it, why this is so cool, and where I think this could really expand with some help from Apple making changes and why we may actually get there. So in general, it is a...

coffee maker. It's very tall and it'll, it'll do single serve coffee. So not like a craft or anything like that. It works with pods. So you can purchase pods through X bloom compared to others. They're actually roasted to order, or at least many of them are roasted to order. So you can order them. They will roast the beans for you and then they will show up at your door. They're in these little tiny compostable cups. The outside is compostable paper top, and there's a built-in filter. So you just put them into the machine and

And it'll go ahead and you actually pour the beans into the top. It'll grind them to a specific setting, drop them into the little cup, and then it'll do like a pour over style coffee for you to those beans. Now, I know a lot of people are adverse to single serve pod based machines, even if they are eco friendly and fresh beans, which are two of the big problems. But the third one is like, do you really want to buy more pods? Yeah.

You don't have to with this. You can actually just use filters and use your own beans. So my favorite thing is we usually use an espresso, right? And that's what we've been using for years now for our main coffee because it's easy and convenient and it tastes good. But Faith and I travel a lot. We love visiting new coffee shops. And if I find beans that I want...

I can't really do much at home, so I would usually just make them home. I have a grinder, and then I would do the whole pour-over thing, which is very nice, and it's kind of soothing, but it can take you a few minutes. By the time I have everything done, it takes me like 10 minutes to make a cup of coffee. Well, this, I can just buy beans, keep them in an airtight container, and then I just do 15 grams or so of the beans. It has a built-in scale.

I'm jumping around a little bit, but the bottom of this has a built-in scale. So it has a built-in scale on the bottom so I can measure out my beans, put them to the top. It goes through a grinder. There's a water tank on the back, or you can connect it to a water line and then it'll grind everything and pop them out. So you can have fresh coffee from your beans or buying any of their pods, which has some, there's, we've tried a bunch of their pods. Um, I just bought some more and there's a lot of really cool exotic ones that you

were delicious. The coffee's absolutely amazing.

So there's so much stuff to like about this. But coming back to the smart home aspect of it, it's really neat. This thing looks really cool. It's a very, very fancy coffee maker. It looks like it has a lot of different settings and controls. Way more than what I would use for a cup of coffee, honestly. I just grab... I have the wide-awake coffee pods that I like to use. I either use the light roast or the heavy, heavy dark roast. And I...

Usually just drink it black because I enjoy the flavor of very angry coffee. But this looks like a little bit more of an aficionado kind of device for sure. Well, that's what I like about it. It can be so simple of just like...

putting in a pot and making it, or you can start, you can do all these different things with it. If you want to use the grinder, you can just use the grinder on its own. So if you're, if you're doing something else or you're using a machine or using a, you want to make your own pour over, you can use the grinder and you can actually adjust the coarseness setting on there of how fine you want those beans ground.

the water, you can adjust the temperature. And when you're doing the pour over using their app, you can control everything from the temperature, how long the pores are, how long of a pause there is between like your bloom and the rest of your pore, how much is in each of those, um,

You can even adjust like the bloom temperature versus the rest of the temperature, all these super specific settings if you want to go there. My wife even uses it just for making tea because she can just use the hot water. So she'll just put in the hot water, choose her temperature for that, and it dumps out a cup of hot water for her that she can use to make tea. So you can use all these individual aspects of it in their own regard or bring them together for that excellent cup of coffee.

But what I found really interesting was the whole machine can be driven by NFC. So the pods you get, actually, there's two options. One, they can come with a little card that you tap on the top. And it's just an NFC card. Tap it, and it loads up that recipe. Or there will be an NFC chip on the bottom of the pod, and you tap the pod on the machine.

And that'll load the recipe. So that'll contain all the information that is relevant, including like the ground, the grind, ground size, the water temperatures, the durations of everything. All of that is ideally set for the beans that you're using. And you can also craft your entire own custom recipe in the app based on your coffee that you provide. The part that I, that I wish that Apple could change is the,

being able to add your own NFC cards to the wallet app. Right. That's the part that drives me crazy because I can create a recipe in the app, but then you have to literally load the recipe through the app. I would love the ability to like double tap my phone or run an automation in the morning that pulls up my recipe and I can just tap my phone or tap my watch on the top of the coffee machine to load up my coffee profile and dump out my cup of coffee.

That would be ideal. But right now, you can't use the NFC in iPhone for that. You can only use it for access and credit cards, nothing else. I don't know. That's a good point. I swear that this opened up a few years ago, and third-party apps can generate different NFC things because...

Or at the very least, the reader works. So you can copy files off of NFC cards and stuff like that. You can do that. So that is one of the nice things. So like I have one on the pods that I liked. So I actually read it from my iPhone and then I was able to write it to another card. So you can like read and write. I have an app called like NFC tools. So you can read and write NFC things, but you can't save things to the wallet or put out the signal. You can only write. You can't.

I don't even know what it is, but make your phone like take action. Yeah. That's, that's annoying. And I mean, honestly, again, this is just one of those things that it's like, this would be so great for Apple home. And, uh,

I wonder why, you know, if Tim Cook talked about all those years ago having a coffee maker as part of his morning automation, I guess. I think about it all the time. And it's like he doesn't even have the power to get Mountain Dew into Apple Park. So I guess he can't get coffee makers in the home kit. So I don't know. For me, I'll propose something funny here at the end of the show.

I've said it before. I think the Apple Home needs a redesign. And one of the things that they should do and should be considering is allowing apps to donate UI to the Home app, kind of like how photos could open different editing tools from other apps.

The Home app should just be able to tap on the electronic like a robot vacuum or a coffee maker and have the UI be donated by another app into a modal so you can interact with the 3D map and say, hey, go clean this room, hit OK, and then you're back in the Home app. Or open the coffee maker, hey, make this coffee, and then hit OK, you're back in the Home app. That would be the way I would do it. Maybe there would be a way to make it feel more Apple-y.

create some very specific UI around it, but there's ways this could work. And Apple has done it in other apps before. I'm curious if we're not due for a huge redesign with matter getting so complex, adding so many appliances and machines. It's a little archaic that everything's an on-off button. Like a vacuum cleaner should not be an on-off button. So I'm hopeful. And this is a really cool coffee maker. It seems to be made by a bunch of nerds. So maybe...

uh, in the future because matter is kind of so open and software in rather than it being requiring a hardware component. Maybe this is the kind of stuff we can add in after the fact, or you just might have to buy another fancy coffee maker, but this is, this is really cool. And, uh, I'm, I'm glad you found something fun to play with.

I completely agree on the matter aspect because that would be the saving grace to this, to be able to load a recipe. And I could just say, do this, and it does it. I will say it's so funny because Harrison loves to make coffee. Oh, funny. He knows all the buttons to press. So I pick him up and he turns it on.

I, I measure out the beans and I dump them in and then he goes by beans and wave to the beans as they go into the grinder on the top. And then he waves the card on the top and it beeps and it loads the recipe for a three-step pour over. And then, uh, then he drinks, then he drinks a full cup of coffee. Absolutely. He wants me to drink coffee all the time. Now, like it's nine o'clock at night and you know, he's still up and he's like coffee. I'm like,

seriously buddy I could use one he's like coffee and like grabs my hand and walks me to the machine let's go make this yeah that's fun I'm not making coffee right now buddy but I'm sure they make a lot of makes a lot of fun noises and sounds and lets him be involved that's cute

Yeah, so it's a very cool machine. I really want more control over the NFC cards because I just want to create those recipes. Even if I could export it from the app and write it to a card, which is possible, but they don't have it enabled in the app, that would go a long way. I feel like the developers have a lot of power here that they're not using...

they're more focused on the coffee than the technology, but maybe a few petitioned emails could change their mind. I don't know. Absolutely. Absolutely. I hope so. Well, I will put a link for it as well as everything else we covered in this episode in the show notes. So you guys can check it out for yourselves. If you guys have any questions, let me know. You can reach out to me at Andrew at appleinsider.com over on Twitter at Andrew underscore OSU. You can also find me on blue skies. That's the new cool thing. Some over there as well. A similar handle.

Wes, thank you for joining. Anything you want to leave everyone with? Just find me on Blue Sky and let me know what you think. Awesome. Well, happy holidays, everyone. Merry Christmas. We will see you guys next week for another new episode. Give this podcast a 5, 10, 100-star rating on your podcast player of choice. Watch the video version over at youtube.com slash HomeKit Insider. And we'll catch you guys next time.