Eufy Omni E28, ESR Find My Wallet, & More with Consumer Reports' Dan Wroclawski
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Welcome, everybody, to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara. Joining me this week is the smart home editor for Consumer Reports, Dan Raklowski. How are you doing? Good. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Andrew. Yeah, of course. It was great when Consumer Reports reached out about coming on the show, and then they were like, oh, no, he's a listener. It's fine. He knows exactly what's going on. So I'm like,

Perfect. Let's do it. I think this is going to be great. Well, before we get into talking about Consumer Reports and actual product testing and security and all of those things that I'm really eager to talk about, let's go through the news. And we got a couple plugs out of the gate. So first up, Consumer Reports is actually giving everyone who listens to the show a nice discount if you are not a Consumer Reports subscriber. So it's $10 off for a

year. So it's billed as I think $29 for a one year subscription to Consumer Reports and they're a nonprofit. So it all goes back to paying Dan basically, I think is how that works. And all the great testing and advocacy work we do. Yes. Yeah. But also me. It's nice. The link, I'll put it in the show notes, but it is cr.org slash HomeKit Insider. So it's in the show notes, but cr.org slash HomeKit Insider, 10 bucks off for a year subscription.

I also want to mention we did another smart home related video going live. It went live on Friday, so you guys can check it out. If you want to learn more about the Find My app, I know most of everyone listening is probably very knowledgeable about the Find My app. But if you know someone who could use a little bit more, you know about how to trigger notifications based on, you know, someone leaving. My mother was actually coming to pick up

my son this morning and it was like perfect because I could turn on a little notification say when my mom leaves her house send me an alert so I'm like I know I've got seven minutes from the time that she you know leaves her house to the time she gets here so it's really handy bunch of cool little tips for the find my app so check out that video as usual linked in the show notes

As far as actual news goes, we got some new stuff from Govee. I don't know if you've seen these, Dan, but Govee has like the most random shaped lights, I feel like. But these are like, I don't even know what they're called, but they look like branches. They're like little trees that are in your ground and they kind of go up and why off to the sides like little branches. But they are outdoor lights.

tree shaped. They have 64 built in preset scenes and customizations. They are matter compatible for the home app and they do have the RGB WWIC. So it's like the independent control for the different zones within each of those lights. IP 66 resistance rating can handle down to negative 20 Celsius, which I do not know, but it's below freezing. I know that far in Fahrenheit. Um, but the reason they're using Celsius is probably because they're EU at the moment. So they're not available here in the U S so,

But these still look pretty interesting. Like, I don't know. The RGB lights, it's like a gamer designed your pathway. And I'm not 100% sure that would fit our aesthetic here.

Yeah, I like objectively, I think they're really cool. I looked them up ahead of the show. But I just I feel like they're not going to look good unless you have like either a really modern aesthetic for your home, or you're just into having like a really kind of crazy, funky garden or something like that or backyard. But yeah, I just feel like it'd be out of place. At least for me, I live in like a 1950s GI build home, and it would just look just kind of tacky really in front of my house.

Plus, I feel like these lights are not going to pass the spouse approval test. Yeah, I could see that. I could see that. I don't know. They have their place. If you kept them in just the white, I think they would actually look pretty nice because they do just have some downlight and it goes off to the sides and I think you could look...

Again, modern, but like simple. It's the same thing that applies to like the permanent outdoor lights for around your roof that, you know, have become so popular. Like I have those. I leave them white all the time except for like a holiday. They'll go red and white for Ohio State football days. They'll go, you know, red, white, green and stuff around Christmas. And we go like orange around Halloween. But other than that, they are white.

Because everything else just looks tacky, to me at least. I feel you. I have some, I think they're Gobi actually, permanent lights on my house that I was trying out for CR. And yeah, if you leave the colors up, you start to get some interesting comments from neighbors and other people. Yep, I can see it. I can see it. Well, next up in the news, we've got, I don't even know how to say this, but Aralic, A-R-Y-L-I-C? Yeah.

Airy lick, air lick. I don't know, but it's the LP 10 somewhere around there. Uh, this is an airplay streaming box. There's a few of these on the market. I think Elkin might have one. Eve has one, but this is a small little box. It's got a bunch of IO on the back, plug it into your analog speakers and you can cast audio to it as like an airplay device. $99. Um, this is a newer version of their S 10 plus streaming box that they had up before the S 10 plus is cheaper. Um,

like 20 bucks or so, but the older version only supported like the OG Airplay. So it didn't include like the multicast options, like where you can do multiple speakers at the same time and sync up all of their audio. So this does support like the newer, it used to be called Airplay 2 and then they just dropped the 2 and now it's just Airplay.

But yeah, so it supports AirPlay. It's got Ethernet, 2.4 and 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi support. There's a USB port on the back for streaming from a USB drive. There's analog stereo line in and out as well as optical. And I kind of thought this was interesting then. It has a USB-C port for power. But if you plug that into a computer, not only will you power it, but you can use that as a audio line in and cast that way. I mean, if you've got a Mac, it doesn't really matter. But for anything that doesn't support AirPlay, it's kind of handy.

Yeah, it's a neat little gadget. I'm not super knowledgeable about Home Audio, but this made me think of, I think it's Weem is the company. And I know they have some devices like this, but this I think is cheaper. And I like the fact that it also does Google Cast in addition to AirPlay, so you don't have to be locked into one or the other. But it's a neat little gadget.

Yeah, I think they're handy. I don't even have any analog speakers anymore. I moved everything to Sonos and HomePods. We have some on our record player, but that's about it. So not too much anymore. I don't know if you've seen Bird Buddy. Have you seen Bird Buddy before? I have seen Bird Buddy. And I saw their latest stuff at CES in passing and was just like, what is going on? I thought we were just doing bird houses here.

I know. And their CES booth was very cool because it was like, it was literally just like, it felt like honey. I shrunk the kids and you're in like a giant garden with massive flowers everywhere. But it was one of those things that was almost too annoying because there was so many people there. I couldn't get anyone to talk to because there were so many people who were asking for free sunflower seeds or something. And I'm like, I'll, I'll just, I'll look at the PR later, but I got all my B roll that I needed and headed out. But yeah,

Their new Kickstarter is live. So they have two new products aside from the bird feeder that, you know, we've talked about on the show before. They have Wonder Blocks and Petal. Now, neither of these are specifically like HomeKit Matter enabled yet, but they are very cool. So the Wonder Blocks, they're these big old blocks that you put in your yard and they're meant to be like what they call a habitat system for nature.

nature. Bees, butterflies, other pollinators, you can put flowers in them. The mortar bees that make the little holes in mortar in like their solo bees, like they're doing it on their own. You can put like one of those hives in there, like all sorts of stuff that you can add to it. And then they have Petal, which is this tiny little AI powered camera that

It can identify over 2000 species of plants and create these little video clips for you. So you can like tune in, check on your garden that way. But it also apparently that using the AI can give you tips on your garden based on how things are looking.

And it also can just like, hey, here's a butterfly. Here's a beetle. Like random things that are in your garden. And I really like the smart garden stuff. So I thought these were very cool. $129 for early backers, though I don't know what that means. I wrote that in my notes and I don't know what $129 is for. I think that's just the pedal camera. Okay.

Yeah, the whole setup with the Wonderblocks I think was closer to like $400, something like that. Because the Wonderblocks are bigger, so that tracks. I copied it out of the thing and then I didn't add context.

So that was on my bad. So good thing you were here. Fact checking. Yeah, you know, I think it's a really cool product. I think it'd be really fun actually with kids. Like my five-year-old would love to like see clips of new like bugs and butterflies and bees and whatnot. Maybe not bees. He's afraid of bees. But yeah, it just looks like a really fun product. And I also love, I noticed it's...

It's not, it sounds like it's not included, but there is a wonder hub you can get, which will do all of the recording and AI processing locally, which I think is really nice. I'm, I don't know about you, but I'm just like getting tired of additional like camera subscriptions for different things. So that just seems like a nice option. Yeah. I really like that. I mean, that's, you know, home kids doing a lot of their AI processing locally and if

If you have to have someone like them do like a local hub that you can just add on, like if you care about that, you can do it, which is a really cool option. So yeah, anyone interested in those Kickstarters going live? I love I don't know if you still have one of those bird feeders, but I love it. We get so many cardinals. So I feel like all my clips look the same right now. It's like, oh, there's a northern cardinal. But the photos are like really clear. Like it comes out really nice. Yeah, it's a really fun little little gadget for sure. Yeah, I'm a big fan.

Okay, both of us might be tired of this topic already, Dan, but we got to talk about another robotic vacuum. This one is actually a little more interesting than most, I will say. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E28.

And it is a robotic vacuum with many things that we come to expect anymore. LiDAR, 20,000 PA suction, dual side brushes, the automatic do everything docking station with self-emptying dirty water, dust, everything like that. Refills with clean water, auto detergent mixing, heated drying, all of that. Has a little arm called the corner rover arm that comes out and cleans around the corners. We've seen those before. They have bottom brushes.

They are two, they go together so they're like short, they're only four inches maybe, three, four inches long. And they have a little gap in the middle and they spin around and they're slightly tapered I believe. So that way things like hair kind of slide off these vortex brushes and then go up into the inside to prevent tangling. So they claim that they won't tangle anything.

All that is pretty similar. But what makes this different is on the top, they have a wet dry vac, like a handheld. Pick it up, move it around your house, portable deep cleaner. And you pick it up, you can spray water onto your carpet to clean something and it'll suction it up. So if you got anything on your couch, on your carpet, whatever, you can use this to do that.

I think this is really cool. Oh, matter support too for the vacuum. That's important. But I think it's really cool, but I wish they had like scrubbers on the deep cleaner, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it feels more like it's trying to just be a carpet cleaner, which is great. And it's nice to have. And it's nice that it's all in one. But yeah, it does feel like a little random. I feel like the other Eufy model where it can turn, it also can function as like a stick vac or a hand vac is more practical, at least like from day to day.

I mean, I will use a carpet cleaner because I have two kids under five and they just make messes and spill things all the time. But yeah, it feels like it's not going to be for everybody.

Yeah, I mean, like, same. I'm really interested in it because we have tried... We have a whole big old carpet vacuum or carpet cleaner situation. Between three dogs and the child, the carpets get dirty so easily. And we just put carpet into one of our bedrooms and it's, like, already getting, like, tracked on with things. So I'm already using that. And then I have, like, a handheld one to do. I'm like, oh, this would be really cool to pick that up and just have that in one situation. Yeah.

instead of a second unit because it can spray the water and it can even self-clean, which I thought was a cool feature. Like you press a button, hold the hose up and it'll like clean its internals so it doesn't smell. So like all this seems good. I just wish it would actually scrub, like twist on the end like every other carpet cleaner does. So it's like halfway there. It's like, I really like it. I could use this on our carpet. It just needs to go all the way there and maybe do some scrubbing at the same time.

I wonder if the idea is that it will scrub with that rolling mop head it's got inside the robot, which I thought was really unusual. I don't think I've seen that on any other robotic vacuum, but it's not the most practical thing where you're going to have the robot go scrub the carpet and then you come and finish it off with the carpet cleaner. Yeah, exactly.

And the PR images, if you saw them, they, this is one of the times where I'm like, that looks too good. Like it's clearly, like they show like someone spilled a cup of coffee and it's like deep, dark brown. And then where they pulled back with the thing, it's completely clean. Like nothing was ever there. And I'm like, no, that's not even close. That's not real life. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not trying to detract from Eufy being a legit good because they do a lot of their vacuums. And I'm so glad there's some more innovation coming here. But it's not going to do that, especially now without scrubbers on there. But if you have carpet, couches, and something that makes messes, like a little human, this I feel like could still be useful. Especially at $1,000. Yeah.

Yeah, I was really surprised by the price. Like when I saw everything that this thing could do before I saw the price, I thought for sure this was going to be like a $1,500 model. And it's not like it's kind of surprising.

Yeah. I mean, Yuffie is generally cheaper, but it's a very decent price. And I always find it interesting. It's like we've ran out of ways to do attachments onto the robots, and now we're adding on Transformer style, so they're base stations. Because we've had a few of the stick vac version. Yuffie had it. Ecovacs has one. Switchbot has one. And now we've got...

Eufy doing something new with a spot cleaning, deep cleaner, carpet cleaner thing. But yeah, it's always interesting what they're going to add next to these robotic vacuums to try to encourage people to upgrade. Well, you know, it'll probably just be two vacuums added on your vacuum instead of just one. You know, we've got to just keep upping the number here. Well, yeah. So, I mean, we're going to have one with a stick vac on the left and we're going to have a deep cleaner on the right as well as the robot on the bottom. Exactly. We're just going to...

We're doing, I'm building, eventually, I have so many projects, like wood projects to complete first. Like I'm building Harrison a smart bed and everything. But after like my other projects, I'm doing a new like coffee bar and cabinetry in our dining room. And I was like, I really want to make a robot nook, like on the bottom of one of the cabinets where it can like go underneath and go into its docking station so you never see it.

And now I'm like, man, can I even do that? Because the wild robots are coming out of that. I was going to give it some room, like, you know, over design. But still, I feel like I can't even get to that point because between the stick facts and other things, there's just they're too big. I need just a whole closet, basically. Yeah. Design around that.

I mean, I hope the robots themselves don't get any taller because, you know, that would be the purpose of cleaning under things. But yeah, all these attachments and water tanks and dirty water tanks and dustbins, like, yeah, it's a lot.

fordron they have gotten smaller like the last few that i have seen have been smaller than i thought like the the z70 from roborock with the arm it was a lot i mean i saw it at ces but like actually holding it here in the house i was like this is a lot smaller than i thought it still has like really high suction and mopping and all those things and an arm built into it and yet it's shorter than a lot of the other ones that i've tested so i'm like cool this is a

I mean, it's slow, but it's pretty darn cool. Like, it's really cool to be able to pick up and move things. I'm very excited to keep testing it, but I'm terrified to let my son see it. He just loves the vacuums so much. He names it. He comes out in the morning. I get him from his room, and the first thing he says is, where's mom?

Of course. And like, good morning to you too. And then we walk out and he goes, robot. And then we walked down the hallway and he looks in the dining room and goes, hi Bert. And then just keeps going.

And he constantly comes up and sits on my lap, run robot, run vacuum, Bert, run vacuum. And we have to, so like I just keep turning it on to clean the dining room, just keep vacuuming the dining room again and again and again. And if I show him one with a tiny little arm that can pick up things, he's going to start throwing stuff on the ground and running the vacuum to come pick it up. So I don't.

I don't have time. But hey, at least your floors and your dining room will be very, very clean all the time. They're going to be polished down to just whatever is below the laminate. They're going to be polished. Okay, we got to keep going on because we have more news. I don't think this is specifically brand new. I'm curious to get your take on this too. Find my enabled wallets. This is such a personal item and lots of people have their ideal wallet.

So I want to know what yours is, but this is a relatively new one from ESR. So it came out at some point. I don't know when. I usually see because they've done so many sponsored videos with us. I usually see all of their things and I had not seen this on their website, but it is the Geo Wallet Boost app.

It's a non-folding wallet, so similar to Apple's Find My Wallet that just goes on the back with MagSafe, but it holds four cards and three bills, which is much more than most of them that hold two to three cards max. And personally, I need three cards because I want to have my debit card, a credit card, and my ID.

And if I'm traveling for work, I got to make sure I'm taking like a company card or something. So like I can occasionally have like four cards. And then, yeah, if you ever have any cash on you. And I thought like three bills is very specific. And I'm like, how do I even take three bills? He's like, okay, I can only choose three bills to take with me. I feel like I need to take like a big bill.

So if I take like a 50 or a hundred, but then as soon as you spend that somewhere, you're going to have way more than three bills coming back to you. So like, is that even practical at that point? I clearly have thought way too much about this at this point. Um, but yeah, I don't, I also kind of personally, I kind of like the stand.

Because I do think that it's useful to prop it open and everything. And I sometimes like the little grip because sometimes it's just fun to fidget with or whatever. But I still think this is a nice one. Four cards is quite good. So...

It's still definitely good here. What do you kind of look for? I don't know how much you feel strongly about MagSafe wallets and everything. I don't have a lot of opinions about them, I gotta say. And it's mainly because I have a George Costanza wallet. My wallet is sick. Because honestly, like, I...

I could probably go that route and have just a few cards, but I get anxiety of like, oh, maybe I'm going to need my Costco card or I'm going to need...

I don't know, some other debit card or corporate card or what have you. And so, yeah, these unfortunately probably won't work for me. But they are really cool, and I love the idea of having Find My in them because wallets are just one of those things that are so easy to lose track of or forget somewhere. So I think it's a really useful product, and I'd love to see more of them with Find My. Find My all the things, frankly. Yeah.

Yeah, literally just everything. I did, I don't, ESR in particular has like 10 different find or just wallets, like MagSafe wallets, like 10 different ones. Every time I clicked on it, like it would show me like three different versions of that. And those come in different colors, but they have so many different models. And I'm like, why is the one that I want not in existence really? Like I just want one that'll hold like,

three to four cards at least, like three to five would be perfect. And then some cash and then find my little finger, uh,

holder situation there and I'm okay with it being a little bit thicker it doesn't have to be as thin as like the Apple one and they've already done what the ESR made one that holds five cards that would be perfect but it doesn't have find my so like take just combined and do them like how do you have 10 different ones and not the one that I want there's nothing you need to design your own that's that's where this is going

Apparently. I mean, at this point, I could just get the 5-in-1 and then put in one of the thousand just tracking cards that I have sitting here. Like, these are just so thin already. I'm like, they don't even take that much space to add to my – like, I'm holding up the no-one one in the video, but it is really thin, and it's wirelessly rechargeable. So I'm like, I could do it. It could happen. Yeah.

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buying from your store. They recognize that they can check out with Shop Pay or they can use Google Pay or Apple Pay, which is obviously the one that I prefer. And many websites even support the Wallet app when using the Shopify website builder. So that way, when you buy through a Shopify site, it shows up in the Apple Wallet app. And so few online stores actually do that. And the only ones I've ever seen do it are Shopify stores.

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Nomad, 12 South, Moment. They're all Shopify brands. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash homekit. Go to shopify.com slash homekit. Shopify.com slash homekit. Okay, that's basically the news. That's what we've got going on this week. Let's pivot. Let's talk about consumer reports and all the stuff that you kind of get into today.

I find this stuff super fascinating because I can test things and I can do certain things and I test on usability. But you guys go so much deeper and you guys have all this formal testing processes and things on security and AI and all of that. So tell me a little bit just in general about you, how you got to Consumer Reports, and let's start talking about your testing process for smart home devices.

Sure. So I've been with CR now for seven and a half years, which is kind of mind blowing, but it's just an awesome place to work. It's great if you want to have a family. And it's really nice working for a place that is so mission driven and not just solely focused on making money.

So we do a lot of advocacy work. When we find problems with products, we go to the manufacturer and try to get them to fix them. So it's just a really rewarding place to work. And so for CR, I cover a bunch of different things.

Smart home being one of them, but I also do refrigerators. I do home security. I just randomly got dash cams of all things, so I'll be diving into the world of dash cams. I was going to say, smart fridges, cool, that's smart home. Security system, yeah, I still count that as smart home. Dash cams? Yeah, I think the thought was I'm the home security guy, so it's like security...

adjacent. I'm going to be diving into that world soon. Do a lot of fun stuff. In terms of smart home, we can't test everything under the sun because we test thousands of products every year and there's so much more than that on the market. You really have to pick and choose and try to cover as much of the market as efficiently as you can. But

But so for smart home, we look at smart thermostats, smart locks, security cameras, doorbells, robotic vacuums, smoke and CO detectors. We also do like smart TVs, streaming players, that kind of stuff as well, sound bars. But that's more of like the TV world, which is not me. But yeah, we do a lot of smart gear.

a lot of it. So, I mean, is there one in particular you'd want to start with or? I mean, I have, I have many questions, but like here's, here's a general one. So we have, you have your categories, right? How do you determine within those categories, which ones to even focus on? Because if we look at something like robotic vacuum cleaners, there's a million. I mean, I robot alone, we talked about what they have, like how many releases this year? Nine.

So far, just from that one company and it's May. And then you've got Roborock, which has had three so far this year. Ecovacs has had a few. Switchbots got some. And those are just like the big one. Like you're not even counting like the infomercial brands like Shark that are out there doing them. There's so, so many. So how do you even, you know, winnow those down to the ones that you're going to actually review? Yeah.

That's a great question. So we actually have a whole team of market analysts and it's their job to assess the marketplace for different product categories and sort of

decide, you know, based on retail placement, based on sales, what are the brands and what are the models that the majority of people are buying? And that's what we try to focus on. We can't cover everything under the sun. It's just, it's not possible. You know, all this testing costs a lot of money and it

a lot of time. Um, but we try to cover each market as efficiently as we can. Um, and so for like robot vacuums, yeah, we're going to look at the latest iRobot models, Roborock. Um, you know, we'll also look at the sharks and some of those, um, and really just try to get a sample that is representative of what people are going to see on Amazon at, at in stores, you know, at like best

Best Buy or Walmart or Target and make sure that we have a good pool of products that

people are going to encounter. And even going beyond that, we don't do this for robot vacuums, but I can talk about it for refrigerators. We actually do surveys. Remember, we do both national surveys and surveys of our membership base for different product categories. And then we use all that data and feedback we get on products that people own to create like brand level ratings. So like for refrigerators, we have, I think,

I want to say like somewhere between like 250 and 350 fridges in the ratings right now. Don't quote me on that. I have to check.

But that's just like a drop in the bucket if you go and look at all the models in the market. So we have these, in addition to that, we have these brand level ratings based on all this survey data we collect on reliability, which is important. You want to buy something that's going to last. But also we'll kind of compile that into brand scores and help you look and see, oh, LG does really well as a brand for brands.

top freezer fridges. So even if you're looking at an LG fridge, it's not in our ratings, you can at least look at that data and, you know, get some insight as to whether it's a good purchase or not. Okay, that makes sense.

I want to come back to fridges in a little bit because I really want to talk about the Samsung AI fridges. So we will get to that. So looking back at generally testing devices in general, how do you deal with the question of ecosystems? Because compared to some other thing, a lot of customers are not going to care, but others...

will. And that can completely change the way like, I mean, you're not going to even if you were an Apple home, or if you're a Google home user, you're going to literally ignore everything that is outside of that vertical. And I feel like that is a super important thing to help you have any way of, hey, these are the ones that will work specifically for your things. And then I know matter makes that even harder. But when you're scoring something, how does that wait? Because even if a consumer doesn't even realize it, I feel like it's

When they're buying something now to have that support built in, how is that weighted? And especially as the market is changing, again, people may not even realize it now, but they're going to want to have that option when it does become more popular. And they're like, oh, I wish I would have known that. You know, it might have been a footnote on some reviews and yet it would have been,

It should have gotten a little more call out on some others. So talk about ecosystems and kind of how that plays into things. So it's not weighted super heavily in scoring, but it is something we do account for. And we check to see if it's there and if it works. So a lot of these ratings for like thermostats and locks and security cameras, we actually, if you go to the review page for each individual device,

model you will see, you know, under like a features and specs section that will list which systems it works with. And we mainly focus on, I don't want to say their names, but Amazon's assistant, Google Home and Apple Home. And, you know, we'll just simply note, does it work with that? Does it not? Is it, we also will sometimes note if it's like a paid feature, which we have encountered, which is annoying, but is a thing.

And that will be weighted into like a smart feature score, but it's not like a huge factor. You know, our focus is serving really like the mass market consumer and the mass market consumer is still unfortunately not that onto the smart home bandwagon. It's definitely improving and I think Matter will get us there eventually, but it's been a slow ride. Yeah.

So yeah, we do account for it and you actually you can filter our ratings by ecosystem to like help you just if you wanted to see what are all the smart locks that we've tested that work with Apple Home you can like check click a checkbox and you know sort and just see those models. So it is something we take into account and it's something trying to even improve and do better in the future because

I mean, just with Matter alone, everything is becoming connected and becoming a potential accessory to all these different smart platforms. So it's something to keep track of that we need to do a lot of work on. True. And I feel like you have...

You have more responsibility than someone like I do. Because to my audience with HomeKit Insider or Apple Insider, guess what? They're going to care about HomeKit slash Matter there. And it's really easy to kind of narrow that. Everything I cover is basically going to be that. But for you, like you said, it's just that wide audience. And they don't necessarily know. Most of them don't know what Matter is. But I feel like it's your reviews they're going to read that are...

going to have to explain to them why they should know what it is and why it should be important and what it means. I mean, you know from listening to the show, you talk about so many times that Matter has just kind of a branding problem of what is it? Who knows? You know, you go into a store and things say Matter. It's like, no one knows what that is and they're doing very little to improve that. So I feel like right now the only way customers know is from reading reviews and

kind of trying to push that news out there yeah i mean it's it's a big problem i mean we do try to um i don't want to say promote but educate our readers on all these different smart home integrations we generally note them in all the reviews we have buying guides for all these different product categories and we'll note and talk about these features in those guides

And yeah, we do try to just educate our readers. I have a big long matter guide explaining all the nitty gritty and what matter is and what it works with and what devices it supports and all that useful stuff. Because yeah, it's a lot and it's a lot for the average consumer to take in. For sure.

Well, what about one of the big things that I think a lot of people are always curious about? Fortunately, HomeKit stuff is very locked down. But when you get into Amazon, the certification process is a little more lax. How do you quantify and test things like security and the vulnerabilities there? I mean, when we're looking at locks and some of those,

You got to do something. So how do you do security? Yeah, so we have a dedicated team that solely does privacy and security testing on a bunch of products. Right now it's mainly security cameras and doorbells, robotic vacuums, smart TVs, streaming media, players like Apple TV, and Wi-Fi routers. And so we follow something called the digital.

digital standard, which is this testing standard that CR and a bunch of other advocacy groups helped create. And so there's a privacy and a security portion to it. There's a few others, but we don't focus on those. But so for privacy, we look at essentially all the documentation for a product and a brand for privacy. We look at the privacy policies, terms of service, other documentation that they might have. And we

Collect it all hunt it down because it's not always you know easy to find and we read through it all basically we do the reading that one is told to do and never does and You know you use that to understand, you know, what are they doing with your data? Are they selling it? Are they you know using it to improve your products or not all that kind of stuff and we will then you know

judge their policies and turn that into a data privacy score for all these products.

For security, that is a lot of testing to just make sure, is this product using encryption? We do penetration testing to look for security vulnerabilities, and we actually have found some. There was a pretty egregious no-name video doorbell last year that we found that's being sold on Amazon and Walmart and a bunch of other places that you could basically very easily hack.

So we are looking for all these things and we will also turn that into a score. If there's vulnerability, we will try to work with the brand to get the vulnerability fixed. We'll also note that in either articles or reviews and really just try to make people aware that these issues are out there.

Most devices we find actually are fairly secure, and that's good. It's privacy that's actually quite lacking. Even with some Apple Home products, the privacy is like, it's okay. It could be better. But yeah, it's a great resource to have, and I don't think anyone else really does that kind of work, which is really cool. So on the Apple Home side of things for privacy, how does that...

Say something like Eve, right? Just because we talk about them a lot on the show. Like every Apple Home product, you can use it solely with the Apple Home app. How much of those privacy things are coming into play if you're not using their app, if you're just using it through Apple Home? Because many things like sensors and other ones, you don't care about the extra features you can get. You can just scan and go and use it.

How much of those are still relevant if you're not using, like you don't have to have an account or anything?

Yeah, that's a really fair point. I mean, that's definitely a great strategy to avoid these privacy and security problems. HomeKit is very secure and very private, which is great. So yeah, if you do solely use it through Apple Home and you don't have to, there's a lot of products now where you still have to download the app to get the code, especially with MapTor. So that's kind of a problem. But if it has the code on the device,

and you can just use it directly with Apple Home, that's definitely a more secure and private route to go. How do you feel, as someone who tests all of these things, how do you feel about cameras on robotic vacuum cleaners? Ah, I have mixed feelings. Like, on one hand, like...

I love the idea of using one as a roving security guard. We actually had an attempted break-in in our home a few years ago, and so we're now very home security conscious.

And so like certain use cases like that are appealing, but I don't love the idea of it just roaming around and recording everything in our home. I know a few years ago there was a whole big issue because it came out that iRobot was collecting all that footage and was like analyzing it to improve their software. So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it. Not a huge fan of...

cameras in the home in general unless they have like privacy covers I try to only I do need them in the home because I have little kids that often are hurting themselves I need to know what happened but I try to go only with models with privacy covers so I can turn them off when I don't want them recording

That's true. I had the, when I was testing, I can't remember, I think it was the S8 series maybe of the Roborock and they ditched the camera and then they brought it back with the new ones. And I actually, it was like, I missed it. I missed that camera because I, one, I missed it when it would encounter something in your home that it was like struggling with and would take a photo of that, that object. Yeah.

And that was helpful to see what it ran into, something like that. But I also did like it for just running around, finding the dog or something. And my wife has been worried about types of those things. So like we have security cameras, but not, you know, in the bedrooms or something like that. And like, I like that I can move that around to find it if I wanted to.

Harrison also loves when I turn on the vacuum and it's like we're remote and I can pull up the live view and it's going around our house and cleaning. So it's helpful for that too. So like I'm a little bit torn because yeah, I'm like sketched out of something to be able to hack into my robot vacuum and see it. But I'm like, man, I really missed that feature. So it's things like private security that are so important to

on them to make them safe and worth having. And fortunately, like with the vacuum is just tucked away. It's in, you know, corner in the dining room or my future cabinets versus kind of like in, in a main room of the house that is hackable, you know, in a similar way. But I don't know. I kind of like having them. And I liked that the robot, the Roborock one, uh,

You don't have to use it. And to use it, you have to manually turn it on on the bot itself. You have to hold the buttons. So you cannot... Because I think another brand...

It did have security issues and could be enabled essentially remotely. If they were able to like brute force your password or something, they were able to get you to reset it. Then they could be able to get into your account and turn on the camera. But I know on the Roborocks, you have to enable it, set a passcode to do it, and then hold buttons on the bot to manually enable it locally beforehand. So I'm like, I feel like they're learning. There is no, that's progress here. Smart implementation. I mean, the,

Because, yeah, to your point, there are good use cases for the camera. I mean, I even just think of, like, object detection, like being able to tell, you know, like iRobot. I don't know if they still have it, but they used to talk a lot about how they could detect animal drawings, you know, and navigate around those. And that's probably a lot harder to do with LiDAR or some other sensor than it is with just the camera and, you know, AI vision. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, let's wrap this up and talk about fridges real quick. I am very curious on your take, and this is something that I don't know how I feel about because in my view, it's like on one hand, adding things like AI and cameras and all these things to an appliance is dumb, and an appliance is expensive, and you want to have it for many years, and that's, I feel like, going to get outdated quickly, right?

But on the other hand, I have been in the grocery store. I'm like, shoot, do I have this? And I could use my Samsung app to see in the fridge and see what I had. And it's also Faith redoes the fridge every single month because it has that whole drawing board and photos. And she puts photos up that she took over the past month of all of her activities and fun things. So it's like I'm always excited for the beginning of a new month because she does a whole new –

you know, collage thing on the, on the front of our fridge. So like, I like all these little features. So like, I don't know how I feel about it. There's privacy. There's it's unnecessary costs and it has to, doesn't last very long. I don't know. So what do you think about them? And especially now Samsung adding straight up AI to its fridges.

Yeah, I mean, it's tough. They do have a lot of fun and useful features. You know, even just being able to use the tablet as like a kitchen TV, I personally think is really nice. But yeah, unfortunately, consumers expect big appliances like refrigerators to last like at least a decade. And we've already seen, at least with Samsung, they have essentially stopped providing updates, software updates to consumers.

some of the Family Hub models that were I think only five or six years old at the time, which is, you know, that's only half the fridge's life. So it is a big problem. I would really caution people if they're shopping for a new fridge to think about if they really want this just because I doubt it will be supported for the lifetime of the fridge.

But there is a lot of cool stuff you can do. The internal cameras, I think, especially are really useful, like you're saying, if you're at the grocery store. I did just recently try out one of the bespoke AI fridges that has the cameras with AI vision that can ID food and log it and like log when it was put in the fridge and also by looking at a database at expiration dates.

So it could be really useful to cut down on food waste. Unfortunately, it only works maybe 50% of the time. It just had a lot of issues IDing food. It really can only, at least right now, do produce and things like that. It can't really do anything in packaging. It can do clear packaging. I was able to put a clear container of strawberries in the fridge, and it did get that they were strawberries.

But it's yeah, it still has a long way to go. I think it can get there. I was impressed it worked at all, frankly. But it still has a ways to go.

What about like in the drawers? Does it have additional cameras in like the crisper drawers? No. So it can see through the clear crisper drawers, but it's only going to see what's in the front of the drawers. It won't be anything in the back. Well, actually, I take that back. So it depends on the model. There was one model where it it's more like the classic family hub models where it's three cameras pointing inside the fridge and

And then there's the newer model, which actually has a camera overhead looking down. So it records each object as you're putting it into the fridge, like in your hands. So still not as great because it's not getting the best angle of the item. And I felt like I kind of had to show the camera the item as I was putting it inside the fridge, which no one is going to do in real life.

But yeah, it's not going to see things that are on the door shelves because the doors are open. And so if you're kind of putting it off to the side, it's going to have a harder time seeing that because it's not actually passing under the center of the fridge. So yeah, it's a cool idea. I think it will work one day, but there are just a lot of kinks to iron out.

This has so much potential. So I have one of the family hub models, right? Probably lost support and I don't even know it. And one of the things that it's supposed to do is tell you what you have in the fridge. So I will load up the fridge and all of a sudden it will pop up and say, hey, you just put in tamales, grape tomatoes, and a can of dog food. Do you want to view recipes? And I'm like, none of those were correct. It is horrible.

It is wildly wrong. But at the same time, like, God, do I want that to work? I would love just people to be like, I don't know what you want to do for dinner tonight, babe. I'm like, hold on. Let me ask the fridge. And it's like, hey, you've got these things in here. You could make these 10 dishes. I'm like, that looks good. Let's do that. And like, have an option. But we are so far away from that. Like you said, I feel like I could get there, but...

Mine doesn't count as an AI model. I don't know what they're specifically touting these earlier ones as, but it is very wrong, but I always want it to work.

Yeah, no, I mean, I feel like that's kind of easy to say, but like the Holy Grail in like the refrigerator space, because there is so much food waste. I think about in my own home with two little kids, like I feel like I'm always finding things that are old and gross and should be thrown out or I'm throwing out food that is, you know, half eaten or, you know, fell on the floor or what have you.

So, yeah, I would love to have a fridge that could, you know, say, hey, you have this broccoli that is like almost two weeks old now. It might still be good. It might not. But if it is good, you should definitely do something with it. Like to me, that's useful because that, you know, cuts down on waste. It saves money on groceries, which I think everyone would appreciate right now. Yeah.

There's a lot of genuine use to it if it can work. And I think we will get there. I do feel we will get there. It's just there's a lot of just weird scenarios that you have to think about, about, you know, things on the door shelves, things in bins. And this isn't even tackling the freezer. This is only for like the... Yeah, that's a whole separate problem. So the freezer is like a whole other topic. Yeah.

But I do think we will get there. I just think you're going to, frankly, need a lot more cameras inside the fridge to look at everything.

I agree. I also feel like they need to upgrade the processing power. That is one thing I'm always annoyed because they always see it as a shortcut, right? Because no one knows like what processor is in a fridge or a light bulb or something. And then when Apple added features or matter added features, they're like, yeah, we can't support that. We don't have enough memory. We don't have enough, um,

processing power on the chip to actually do adaptive lighting or some of these other things and it was really annoying like you can't keep doing that and sometimes our fridge will there's like that nice little effect right when you close the samsung fridges and it like shakes a little bit like on the image and makes it feel you know i get a little more real a little more responsive and occasionally it'll just like freeze when it's doing that and then like jump and stutter and i'm like

I think you just need a little more processing power. Don't cheap out on that. When you're looking at a fridge, it's going to be like north of $2,000. The amount to jump up to a slightly faster processor has to be relatively minimal. And like I said, we want these appliances to last 10 years. You can't short yourself that early on something that people just don't know.

No, I agree. These things are very underpowered, especially given you expect them to last for a decade. It would really help if they just spent a little more on

putting in more memory and faster processor i think unfortunately the margins on appliances are just so thin that they're trying to you know cut costs wherever they can and unfortunately this is one area where uh they're not really thinking long term they're just thinking about what what can uh you know this the most um make us the most money essentially really yeah it's true

Well, I feel like we could keep chatting forever, but I feel like we should eventually cut our episode off because we're just, we'll just keep going. Is there anything else you want to leave us with Dan? Uh,

No, I mean, I'll say this, you know, CR is a really great resource for anything you're looking for in your life, whether it's home appliances or tech or baby gear or a new car. We cover all that and more. I am trying my hardest to make it a really great resource for the smart home for people interested in smart home gear. Yeah.

You know, we have a lot of great reviews and content for you. So I'd just say really check it out. Really consider the promo code you mentioned earlier at cr.org slash HomeKit Insider. You know, it's a really great deal. And I mean, frankly, I think you'll make your money back just in savings that you'll get when you buy a product, really. Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Dan, for hanging out today. This was great. Come back anytime. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Everybody, you guys know what to do. So check out Consumer Reports. If you guys have any questions, let me know. You can reach out to me at Andrew at AppleInsider.com or Twitter, Andrew underscore OSU. Same thing with like Blue Sky and Threads. I'm over there too. Instagram, I'm getting messages. You guys can find me all the places. You can watch the video version of this over at YouTube.com slash HomeKitInsider.com.

Otherwise, Dan, thank you for the 30th time, and we'll see everyone else next week. Thank you. Thank you.