More New Matter Devices, Siri Delays, & Trimmable Smart Shades
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Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara. Joining me once more this week is Wes Hilliard. How you doing, man? Pretty good. Woke up to an internet outage, so we'll see how this goes. Could all just explode at any moment as we're tethered to my iPhone, which is also my camera.

mysterious powers are playing. Yeah. And, and it's powering my iPad, which is my show notes. So it's, it's all, it could all just catch on fire any minute. Oh, well, what's been new with you? I mean, it's been a couple of weeks since you've been on the show. Anything fun been going on? Uh, well, so I, funny enough, I have a router review that's about to go live on Apple insider, uh, TP links, wifi seven, basically their base router set, which is I've enjoyed so far. Uh,

I unplugged them all to review them, not really thinking it would do anything. It just acts like a power outage, right? Plug them all back in, ignoring the fact that an internet outage happened at the same time. Also, my Hue hub decided to just, I don't know, reboot its Matter protocol because it wanted to reconnect as a new Matter hub.

Which then added all of my lights to my home again. So I had to go and delete the original Hue Hub. That's a bug. They fixed it on the new beta. Oh, no. Well, I had to re-add everything and rename it and re-add it to all my scenes, which is very silly, but it took, you know, 15 minutes and I was done. But still, just like, why? Of course, of all the things to have. Just lesson learned. Never unplug the routers again. Yeah.

That's what you get. Well, I'm back here. We're back in the studio again. It was really fun. I don't know if you caught last week's episode, Wes, but it was really fun to actually sit and talk with Andrew Green from 12 South a little bit about working with Apple and the standby mode and all that kind of stuff. It was fun to record from their office, but it also is a glass bowl. So...

We did the best that we could. My friend Rachel, she tried her best with the audio to make it sound as good as possible. And it sounds a lot better than what it did when we recorded it. I've heard worse. Let me put it that way. It was fine. I could hear what you guys were saying. And, I mean, I wouldn't put it in, like, 3D audio surround sound in your car or anything because you might get – your car might explode. But otherwise, it was a good show. I enjoyed the conversation.

Yeah, it was definitely a fun chat about everything. And then, you know, back into things back at home, I was over, I ended up spending, I swear, like two hours at my grandmother's house trying to set up a robotic vacuum cleaner for her. She picked up the SwitchBot K10 Plus because she wanted like a little bitty robo vac. And that's the first time I played with one of those in person. And it is adorable. It is so tiny and cute.

But at the same time, I could not for the life of me figure out how to update the firmware. It just kept showing me the firmware and I could not figure out how to, like I knew it wasn't the latest version. And I'm like, where, where is the firmware? Why can't I update it? So I went around for like 20 minutes, but I was also trying to get home to bring food back for Faith and,

Like I was rushed through the whole thing, but yeah, I've been living in a lot of robotic vacuums lately. I have a question. So I'm actually trying to get a hold of a product for review later. A robotic lawnmower. Have you ever checked any of these out? Many.

Yeah, so this one has a boundary wire, which makes me sad inside a little bit because I almost would rather mow the lawn 17 times this summer than have to stake the ground with a wire one time to save me the trouble. But other than that, it looks cool. I don't know. I'm going to try it out. But it makes me wonder, will we see matter-enabled robotic lawnmowers? Because it's basically a vacuum cleaner. Yeah.

I really do think we will. I think that's been a trend, right, like that we've seen recently in the world of smart home. I feel like all the companies together are like, well, we've got a lot on the inside. What can we do on the outside? Because we've had new Matter outdoor motion sensors, I believe. Onvis maybe came out with one of those. We had a car launching its G5 Pro camera, which is also like an outdoor home hub feature.

and thread border router and everything to extend that stuff. We have the Eero outdoor Wi-Fi range extenders that are pretty nuts. TP-Link has one too. Yeah. So there's been all these new outdoor smart things. A grill. I'm testing a grill soon that has these smart features and an app connection, and it's just like all this outside stuff that I'm going to have to start figuring out how to get power to, so that's going to be interesting. Yeah.

But I'm with you. I just want more things in my home app. I really do. I've talked about this before. Put my toothbrush in there, right? Like, why not? Let's go get everything into the home app. Lawnmowers, robot vacuum cleaners, grills, just the routers, you know, home kit routers. Who ever heard of them? That'd be cool. Yeah.

Don't even get me started on routers again. I did a whole video breaking down the C1 chip and how I still wanted routers. And I had so many people in the comments saying, yeah, Apple should bring back the airport routers. I'm like, I know. I know it. Well, I've also been testing. I've been trying to test robot vacuum cleaners in Matter. And I'm very excited. And there's...

It's been a process because, you know, things aren't out yet. Nothing is out yet, really. So I don't have anything fun to share yet, but maybe by next week's episode, I can actually talk about...

getting these running and for sure what you can and can't do, but it has been a process. So it won't be once it's released, just, you know, working, working hard to try to find what is actually new before it releases. And I feel like I'm going to get to the bottom of it by the time we release in April. That's how long this is going to take me. And I could have just avoided the whole thing, but that's what I do for all of you out there.

Well, we should probably get into the news, Wes. Maybe. We should probably get into the news. Starting out, MacRumors, as they usually do, dug through the code inside of iOS 18.4, the latest beta, and they found even more evidence of Apple's smart home hub,

shocking. They found out that ChatKit, one of Apple's frameworks, has been added to tvOS 18.4. And why would you need ChatKit on Apple TV? So that's the framework that works in iMessage and does things like tap backs and things like that. Not a feature supported on the Apple TV, but theoretically that would be a great feature for some sort of smart home hub that is based off of tvOS. So

Clearly, we're going to get iMessage on the Apple TV. That's what this is about. I think that's what this means. Yeah, a fool. Yeah, and then you'll actually use your phone in front, and then it'll use eye tracking that they pull from Vision Pro, and you'll just stare at your TV to type on the keyboard. That's how it's going to work. You'll buy a Microsoft Kinect, and then you'll use your hands to gesture at the TV to type on a giant keyboard. Did you ever watch Community? Yeah.

No, I need to, though. Oh, my God. Okay, first off, one of my favorite shows, but they really made fun of VR. I mean, this obviously was years ago now, but the Dean gets this ridiculously bulky, stupid VR headset with giant gloves and

And every single thing he needs, like to delete a file, he had to climb a virtual file cabinet and open a drawer and remove this massive file and then run it over and then throw it away. And he's like, I am all powerful. And it just feels like that. Like it's so unnecessarily draining. It was great. It was so good. Yeah, it's a future. Why not just make everything harder for us? Yes.

Well, it would be easier if we had a home hub just to centralize everything in our homes. I'm really excited about this device. And I'm still of the mind that we're going to see it sooner rather than later. We got one rumor saying that it was going to come later in the year or early next year. And I'm denying that rumor. I'm going to ignore it because everyone else said it was either first half or mid 2025. Okay. So here is, this is the only, this is my only thing, only thing.

I think for this to not suffer at launch or at announcement, Apple needs this new version of Siri. And the news that we got even this week is that that is not ready yet. It wasn't 18, four. I'm not saying a whole LLM like chat bot version of Siri, but the more powerful one with app intents and everything like that. And that sounds like it's coming in 18, five. We discussed this on the Apple insider podcast. Um,

I don't think the timeline really changed. This is one of those weird things where the point number of an OS release is kind of insignificant. It's just the next release number. And...

They always predicted, right? A German and whoever always predicted 18.4, because this is when it would come out. But Apple looking at the release, they're preparing for the child safety stuff. They have a new updates surrounding visual intelligence and bringing that to iPhone 15 pro and a few other things that are important for, uh,

significant releases. So 18.4 was supposed to have App Intents, but it was also supposed to come out later, right? We always expected it to be an April-ish release, and this 18.4 is still in April, but that just means 18.5 is coming out late April, early May. Like, it's probably going to be right on the heels of 18.4. So I'm not really buying the rumors that this is delayed or they're making mistakes or having bad times internally. It's just...

This is how these things go. I'm really interested in seeing how App Intense and everything ties together. And I'm with you. This is going to be a good system for that Home Hub, but it's going to be all... Apple's putting a lot of work on the developers here to support this, kind of like with the Vision Pro, because if they don't support it, it's like it doesn't exist. So we'll see how it all goes. I know. I just think that it has to have that to...

to do things. And we saw there was a, there was a massive gap that was very irregular for Apple between the launch of 18.3 and the first beta of 18.4. That typically does not happen. It's usually within days based on every year in the past. And there was like a couple of week at gap. And then it randomly dropped on a Friday. Apple did not intend to,

originally to say, yeah, let's drop 18 for run a Friday. So there was clearly something going on and I would, I would believe German that Apple was intending to launch it with the beta version of Apple's assistant and it had to strip it all out, which pushed it back a little bit, whether or not it's a month or so behind. But that's all I'm saying is that it's a little behind. My argument here is I think it's Ohio. Um,

Just passed a piece of legislation demanding that app store owners have child protection features. And that passed like two days after Apple announced its new features. So I feel like it's a little bit of both. A, they're like, yes, we get a little bit more time. So I have relief. But also we need to get all of these features out because...

It's important to get ahead of these lawsuits because I don't know what timeline they're given to have these features, but it's probably coming pretty quick. That's true.

Well, also in the news, we have more Matter accessories coming in 18.4. So it looks like CyberMod Studio has found that there is successfully working water leak detectors. Once again, we know that water leak sensors are part of HomeKit or Apple Home, but they were not...

If they were matter accessories, he has gotten them successfully working. So now we know we have robotic vacuum cleaners. We know we have smoke detectors and now we have water leak sensors that are all matter and working in 18.4.

For, I know I've said this before, so not to beat a dead horse, but when a company adopts like a new version of Matter, like 18.4, they are not obligated to support every accessory type. So Apple coming out and say, we're going to support not 18.4, sorry, not 18.4, but Matter 1.4, they don't have to support every other accessory in there. Instead, they said, we're going to support robotic vacuum cleaners.

You know, eventually that was what they announced with 18. So we have no idea what if any other accessories that they're going to be adding from matter one, two, one, three, or one, four, because there were several versions that had been added. So matter vacuums were in 1.2 with a subsequent addition of the service area clusters in 1.4 and Apple seems to be pulling both of those parts together.

But we don't know if we're going to get any other accessories from 1.4, 1.3, 1.2. Doesn't it? My still personal theory is that Apple's going to give us a lot of this because it's going to launch with this home hub and they're going to announce a bunch of new accessory support. But we'll see. Yeah, I feel like this year we're going to see a huge push forward in accessory compatibility and matter.

with Apple Home, but doesn't it feel like we were supposed to be not doing this? I mean, back when Apple announced HomeKit, for example, it was kind of supposed to fix this and not have to deal with all these compatibility issues and rolling out piece by piece. And then HomeKit, I guess, never took off properly, and Apple did help build Matter and all of that, and the HomeKit systems and encryption and all of that's involved here. But...

It's also now reliant on this large ecosystem of different manufacturers and different things trying to adapt these features. And we're back to square one again, which I think HomeKit was trying to prevent, if I remember correctly. They just kind of wanted it to be dumb plug and play for the users that didn't have to think about this stuff. And now here we are talking about, well, which MatterVersion are you on? And which features are they adopting? And

I just feel like it should never have been this complicated. I mean, we shouldn't be talking about when are we getting robot vacuums? We should be talking about when are we going to add literally everything in our home to Apple home? I know I keep coming back to that, but it just, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like it should be this complex. I understand that the systems behind Apple home have to all communicate and there's thread and there's all these different intersections and they have to use Apple TV as a base computer to make these things happen. But again,

There's a disconnect here. Is it one guy working at Apple on all this Apple Home stuff? I just don't understand. Yeah, I mean, totally. That's very much a problem that we have delved into a lot on the podcast. But basically the way my understanding is, so there's the CSA, which is made up of like I think over 100 member organizations or hundreds member organizations, whatever it is. It's a lot.

And, you know, they all get together like, ah, these are like our big projects that we're going to try to work on. And individual companies can really kind of lobby for their stuff. So maybe security systems, right?

If ADT really wanted security systems to be in Matter, they could really push for that. And as a member organization, they can devote dev time and people and resources to making that happen and getting it into these Matter releases. But it's really driven completely by those member organizations. Like there's no one who works like at Matter or at the CSA as like a specific company that's just doing all the work. It's literally all the individual organizations who are working and contributing to

together to make this stuff happen. And if any of them feels a certain way about stuff to try to get those done, it can. So that's why I think it's a problem of some of the smaller accessories. We may not see a huge push from them because we need the organizations that make those products to

you know, lobby for them and to say, this is what we need. This is what we need. This is what we don't need. Things like that. And I think it's definitely a hard thing and we're weighing stuff here. It's like, okay, do we just want, you know, all the separate ecosystems like we've had in the past, or do we want to actually do something where everything's going to play together and work nicely and we're all on the same page? That sounds better, but to get there, it's very hard. And I think right now it's still the beginning. You know, we're only a couple of years in and they're still adding devices.

We need to get to a point where it's like not so much about adding devices but improving it and adding additional features and layers and stuff like that. They just need to support all the devices, which is what they're still just working through because things like cameras are ridiculously complicated, especially for everyone to play together with. Just a little bit of growing pains. Yeah, agreed.

Well, if anyone saw the Amazon stuff, I know I talked about it with Andrew Green a little bit, but as him and I were both dismayed about the lack of new hardware, apparently that was a sentiment shared by many others because it was going around on social media. People were like, where's, that was it? A whole giant press conference for basically a paid version of Amazon's assistant. Well, they kind of not walked it back, but I think it was a CEO who says beautiful, I'm saying quotes, beautiful new hardware is coming this fall.

So that's what you guys can expect in terms of new hardware for Amazon. If you really wanted some new, you know, Amazon Assistant-enabled products to take advantage of the new version of Amazon's Assistant, you can look forward to seeing that in the latter half of this year. I think that's going to be interesting, especially as...

Amazon, Google, Apple start to really increase adoption here and add more device types and everything like that to kind of bring everything up onto level with each other. Right now, it's like Samsung is the only one who's adopted everything. They're way ahead of everyone right now. So Apple and others definitely need to play catch up. Samsung has at least two employees working on their adoption, so...

They, they're, they're a little, they're a little ahead of everyone else. I, everyone else stick with that one employee there. Yeah. The Amazon announcement, I just wanted to say just so silly, um, because cool. I love, uh, pre-recorded demos of technology that no one else can use right now. Um, and then everyone going to write about how amazing this is and how behind Apple is on a

thing that nobody's used yet. So we'll see how it all works. I'm interested in this Alexa plus thing or whatever. It's going to be cool. The stuff they showed looks interesting. I like the idea of getting some LLMs behind some of the smart home technology. It should technically do better. I am just now getting notifications for 30,000 things coming online because I think my, I think my wifi finally returned.

Wow, we're seeing this happen in real time, folks. This is what it's like for your entire house to come back online. Yeah, so many cameras and doorbells and home hubs coming online right now. But yeah, no, I'm interested in seeing what Amazon does here, of course. They've been around just as long as Apple in this space, if not a little longer, and

They got to make the move. I kind of honestly thought that name was going to die and they were going to replace it, but maybe the brand recognition was too strong. It's just like with Apple and its smart assistant. I don't know. We'll see. I want to know when it all rolls out. Is it all coming next week? Because then, yeah, maybe Apple is a little behind. Or is it coming throughout the year? Then they're more on the lines of Apple. I just always find it funny when you see all these headlines. Look how bad Apple is. It's just like...

Apple announced their initiatives last year, and they're rolling it out slowly over the last year. And then Amazon suddenly has a press conference showing prerecorded demos, and Apple's behind again. I'll never understand that. We'll see. I'm definitely going to test something out. But it launched this month for what it's worth. So it could be next week. It could be the week after that that they say it's coming in March. So we'll have to see how that actually holds up.

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So moving through the news, IKEA seems to have some new sensors coming on the way. According to once more CyberMod Studio has found this in the regulatory databases, but IKEA is getting ready for a new matter over thread temperature and humidity sensor. So notably this will be their first direct to matter device, not requiring one of their hubs with very, uh,

you know, sounding names. So you'll be able to just connect this to matter, no hub and get temperature and humidity, which is really interesting because their devices are always very affordable and very, for the most part, very reliable. I would say the setup process on the bulbs used to be a Royal pain, but it has improved. I think their reliability is good, especially once you get past the setup process. So there's, they're kind of avoiding all that and you can just add it to the home app, but I'm excited to see how this actually turns out and what the price is going to be like.

Yeah, I mean, I visit IKEA twice a year because we don't have one around here. But if I make it to Virginia Beach, I usually go to their location. And it's nice to know that soon maybe there will be MatterStandard and more of their devices where I can just pick up whatever smart thing and know that I can take it home without a hub and hook it up and not have to worry about it. And IKEA makes some cool stuff, so it'll be nice to have it make it to more of its devices. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ecobee, they finally have it out. Their essential thermostat, so the Ecobee Essential Smart Thermostat is available. This thing comes in at $129.99, so a pretty darn affordable price for an Ecobee thermostat.

We saw this at CES. I got to play with it in person there, and it was pretty solid as far as smart thermostats go. It supports Apple Home directly. There is no Matter support. If that matters to you, probably not. There's not a ton yet you could do with the Matter side of things, and at least it's working natively in Apple Home. The only reason I would want to see Matter here is if you did have a secondary home

home hub type device that is not Apple's upcoming home hub. And you wanted to be able to show like the temperatures in the rooms or things like that or control it.

That would make sense, like maybe like the Aqara one when they start opening it up to support other Matter accessories. That would be the only limitation, but for someone who's looking for like the most affordable Apple Home-enabled thermostat, I don't think that's going to be a huge downside. And if you do want like a Matter-enabled one that is even cheaper, the Resideo one, right, Honeywell Resideo one,

They do. It's just not as pretty as this one is. Yeah, it looks great. I don't know. Have you seen this one? I haven't seen it. I'm assuming it just looks like the usual Ecobee, just a little less flare going on. The front of it looks the same, except it has a white body that's plastic versus the metal. I mean, that's the biggest difference visually from the others. I had the Ecobee, I think –

They changed their names a lot, but it was like the, maybe the Ecobee three. I've had it for years and it finally died. I think a short in the HVAC unit killed a sensor or something in the actual thermostat because we had to troubleshoot, bring a whole guy out here and everything and ended up being the thermostat. So yeah,

It was fine. Years and years of service. It literally, I think like 2016, I've had this thing. So, um, finally went and bought the new one and it turns out,

Uh, so I want to, I got the fancy high end, uh, eco B and it has the air quality sensors, which is nice. None of it's exposed to home kit, which sucks. I, I wish eco B, I don't know why it's not. I'm sure they could, uh, air quality sensors are part of home kit. Um, but everything else works, but looking at this, um, essential version, it's like, well, if it

does the thermostat controls and can tell me the temperature of the room it's in. That's all you really need for HomeKit. The air quality stuff is fine, but it costs you like $100 more just to get it. So this is a good basic entry Apple HomeKit kind of device if you're looking for it. Hopefully, maybe people like us who spend a little extra money to get those other sensors will get to add it to HomeKit at some point. But at least it still gives me notifications through the app. So...

Yeah, that's true. So this one, it does not come with any of the room sensors, though it supports them. So you can pick up room sensors separately and add them to this if you want to, as well as like the door sensors, all of that. So those are supported, just not included in the box like they are with the premium version. That's their most high end at like $249 or something. And then at $199, I think they have the enhanced version. Still metal, still looks really nice. The biggest things you're going to lose out against the high end versions are

is you're not going to have the smart speaker in there because you can actually use the Ecobee as an AirPlay speaker, and you can use it as an Apple assistant. It's basically a HomePod speaker.

These you can ask it questions. It'll relay that question through a HomePod and use this as a smart speaker, which is fairly handy. So that's cool. You're going to have that. And then the air quality sensors, as you mentioned, it also doesn't have, I think like the LiDAR or whatever sensor in there that detects as you approach and like changes the display. I don't think that is in there. So that's another small difference, but core functionality is fine. So definitely reliable and more affordable. I definitely like the,

like airplay destination and, um, smart assistant that you can do with the more expensive eco B it's, it's interesting. It comes in handy. The other thing. Yeah. Since we're talking about eco B, I just figured this out. Finally. I was, who was I talking to?

It might have been the folks at Ecobee, quite honestly. But no, it was. I was talking to the Ecobee people at CES, and I had not got to try this until now. But originally, I had my smart Ecobee thermostat, doorbell, doorbell.

And I had it set up so that when someone approached the door, I got an activity notification on my Apple TV. Popped up and was beautiful. Problem was, it happened nonstop. Like every little freaking movement was blowing up my Apple TV. Motion detected, motion detected, motion detected. And I had to turn it off because it was too much. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. I don't know whose fault this is, Ecobee or Apple's.

But we need to be able to have a better system for this because it's too much. And I was talking to them about like, that's not right. Like there's definitely, that shouldn't be happening. So apparently what they told me was there's actually a spot where you can adjust the range slash sensitivity for the motion, uh,

So I set it to a smaller amount basically on my porch. So like five feet or whatever it is, 10 feet, I don't know the distance, but the smaller amount so that things like leaves in the yard aren't just throwing motion alerts. And now it works perfect. And I'm so happy. So I just turned it back on on my Apple TV and

Now I don't get any errant notifications, and it automatically pops up when someone's on the porch. It is great. It is perfect. So if anyone had one of these and they wanted that Apple TV feature, but they felt like they were getting bombarded with notifications, adjust that sensitivity, and you'll be good to go. And that's in the Ecobee app, right? Correct. Because there is a...

notification zone setting in Apple Home, but you're talking about sensitivity versus what it's scanning. Because for my doorbell, it can see chimes in the far left corner. But when it gets windy, those chimes move and that becomes a package or a person at my door. So

Yeah, definitely like Ecobee side, adjust your sensitivity, but also remember that you need to make sure that you're closing in the area that you're scanning. Like if it can see a sidewalk, maybe like a street side sidewalk, maybe lower the range of where it's looking to just your sidewalk or your yard or your porch. That way you're not just capturing everything in view and guaranteeing that you're going to get 100 notifications a day. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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Well, we talked a little bit about robotic vacuum cleaners and doorbells, and we have a little bit more about that. But SwitchBot has a new product out, and it's not a vacuum cleaner this time. They have self-trimmable smart shades, the very first self-trimmable smart shades. Have you ever had to, like, buy shades and trim them yourself, Wes? No, we have some ugly curtains, and that's about it.

Well, when we got our home, you know, I did get a lot of smart shades, but there was a few rooms where I'm like, I don't care. So I go to the store and first off, trimmable shades are still not cheap. Like they add up very quickly and then you take them and then you cut them and then boom, like they were like honeycomb shades. A couple things. First, did not work that easily. The saw actually melted the ends of the...

And then they were like sticking together. And I was like trying not to tear them as I like opened them, expanded them. So that was fun. But also still not smart shades. These are only $200 and you can trim them after you buy them. And this is the way it works. You get them to your house. The head rail on top is adjustable. It slides like left and right to expand its width.

So you set your width for your headrail, basically just put it in your window and make sure it fits. Once you get that set, you use a custom tool, a cutting tool, to put onto the fabric itself, and you tighten it, but you rotate it around until the entire shade has been cut off.

And you're done. That's it. You can do it yourself. You don't need any power tools. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to measure diddly. You can just do it in your home. Hold it up and boom. Cut it yourself.

They come in white and gray, so not a lot of colors. They do say you can change that color yourself because the smarts are all on the top. You just need to put a new fabric onto the roller so you can always swap it yourself, but you're on your own to actually do that. They are battery powered. They get eight months of use and they support Matter when you connect them to a SwitchBot Hub 2. This is so cool. Affordable and trimmable. Like, and Matter. There we go. Works in Apple Home.

Yeah, this is definitely a good idea. SwitchBot's been having a lot of really good products lately. They seem to keep hitting it out of the park as far as simplicity and setup and ease of use and all this stuff. So this is nice. And $200 ain't bad. I mean, I could do... We have these kind of bay windows, these three large windows in our dining room. This would be perfect. And I'm getting away with three smart shades on my windows for $600, which...

It's pricey, but it's a one-time buy, and they work. Yeah, I mean, even the other more affordable options are still this price or even a little higher still. I mean, I'm looking at, like, we just talked about the Lutron ones from CES that are launching at $399. That's still expensive, and that's their new price-affordable version. So I think this is great. I think the fact that you can trim them at home makes such a big difference because they don't have to custom make them.

like to order. They have, they make three different general sizes that fit a variety of windows and they're good to go. Cause then you're paying colors. Yeah. You're paying labor at that point. If you have to have them trim them yourself, you're getting a custom job made and it's this whole thing. And yeah, that's it. It makes sense to be able to do it yourself and efficiently having a little tool with it. Agreed. Then we have a UV who has their new S three doorbells.

Eufy, again, they too have been doing some very cool stuff recently, and I am here for it. So these are $349 for the S3 and then $399 for the S3 Max. It is a doorbell lock combo device, so retrofit,

You can, they're on the front of it. You have like a ring button to actually ring the doorbell. There is a key pad that you can put in a number and they also have a palm scanner. Everyone's doing palm scanners this year. Saw so many at CES. So you can hold up your hand. It'll scan your palm.

grant you access. And what's nice is you don't even have to touch anything. Like you can just hold your hand up and you don't even have to poke a keypad. You don't have to pull out your phone or even tap your watch, whether or not you have one. It is very easy to get in like that. And there's no facial scanning, which can also pose issues. So I like the idea of the Palm scanner. They say it has higher than a 99.99% accuracy, but they don't tell me how fast it is, which is the thing I'd be curious about. Like I don't be standing there holding my hand for hours.

a second or two, I think speed is important. Um, I still would have preferred like home key or even ultra wide band, which is where people are going, but it is a good option. The difference between the two $50 difference between them, the max version has a display on the inside. So when you walk up to the door, you can actually see a live view of who, who is on the other side.

which I think is brilliant. You don't have to pull out your phone or anything like that. You can literally see on your back of your door who is there. That's super cool. The only part that is a little confusing is it says Matter and Apple Home, but they don't say what parts. Is it the doorbell? Is it the lock? Is it the camera? They're not really specific with all that. My guess is it's going to be just the lock.

If I did a complete guess, but I would guess just the lock of it. They say video is two K HDR, wifi and six month battery. Tell me what you think, Wes. I mean, this is interesting. Palm scanning sounds weird. Uh, I know Amazon did this for a while to pay, right? Didn't they do palms? Um,

Yeah, I don't know. Like, you have to wear gloves sometimes or carry groceries. I feel like there's definitely situations where the palm thing gets in the way when you can just open your phone and unlock the door. It's kind of funny. You build all these products with all these fancy features, and then, like, I've shown my fiancé the door lock, tapping your phone, home key, your watch, all of these things, and

And without fail, when we pull into the driveway, before we get out of the car, she opens her phone, goes to control center and unlocks the door every single time. And it's like, yes, you can do it that way if you choose. Go ahead. But it's just, you know, all these systems, all these fancy security details, pointless. So I don't know. I just find it amusing that like.

Design is so important and some people will just do what they want with it. And I have a feeling the palm scanning is one of those situations where most people will just forget that it's there and just unlock it with their phone.

I don't know. We'll see because I don't think – I think we're moving away from doing – obviously, like you said, there's some people who are just going to continue to do that. But like you said, like, oh, you can just pull out your phone. I'm like, okay, but then I have to pull out my phone. If I'm holding groceries, it's easier to like rotate and hold my hand up versus trying to get into a pocket and pulling out a phone and going into something and unlocking. You know what we need? A doorbell with face ID. I think someone needs to get on that.

Yeah, I feel like that should be a thing. Either that or a special version where as you walk up, it automatically detects that and then authenticates you and then unlocks. So it's already done. It's like ultra wideband or something. Yeah, that would be a good name for that technology. I think we've come up with something. Or, you know, we could just do our own thing and have palm scanning for some reason, but fine.

I think I like it. I feel like it's less invasive than the face scanning. And we have a lot of face scanning ones. I think palm detection is better. I think it's going to be just as accurate and it is easier than pulling out a phone. I think home key ultra wide band face ID would be better. Like Apple's face ID versus third party ones.

But it's a $400 system. It's pretty expensive. I want this on my office door so I can feel like I'm like James Bond every time I come to my office. Scan my palms. I love that you can see who is at your door without opening it. I mean that is such an important thing. That is one of – how many people actually have that as a fear of when they're going – especially like in the middle of the night or something and somebody knocks on your door. It's like who is there? What is this?

What's going on? And that gives you a little bit of peace of mind that you can actually see. You don't have to pull out a phone. You can just walk up to the door and see who's there. Yes, a digital peephole, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good idea. I mean – Well – Go ahead. No, I'm moving on to the next topic. Yeah.

We have one left. One left to get through, which is Abode has launched a new version of their app for Apple TV and Android TV, if you have one of those. But Apple TV. So it pulls up all of your Abode security system stuff. They are one of the very few that support an actual...

Apple Home security system with their abode iota. And it has like that integrated camera and backup battery and cellular option. And then you can put all the sensors on your doors and a keypad and a key fob on your ring to arm and disarm. Works through Apple Home.

And then like they have professional monitoring that you can opt into on like a, even like a weekend basis, I believe. But now if you have the abode IOTA as well as any other abode products, like they have other cameras and everything, all that can show in like one centralized interface on your Apple TV. Uh, the album artwork is like a picture of that or the chapter artwork. I think it looks really nice. They did a great job here. And if you live in the abode space, uh,

This makes sense. Of course, if you are using the Abode Iota with Apple Home and doing everything through Apple Home, there are other HomeKit apps that would do similar things. So it depends on how much of the stuff you have in the space. I'm still really waiting for their long range camera that they announced at CES 2024. That's insanely long. And I've been told that it is still coming and we're getting closer to it. But that I don't think is going to be Apple Home. So I would definitely use this app.

to pull up that camera feed through that. So this is just nice to see. I like about products quite a bit. It kind of makes you, it reminds you that Apple doesn't have an Apple home app for Apple TV. I know control center, you know, you can go and see your cameras or whatever, but it's, it does seem like an omission. It doesn't even like when I was over on over at, um,

My grandma's house doing that stuff. I had to like to show her how to pull it up on Apple TV was ridiculous. Like she had to hold down her, the TV button to open up the control center, then swipe over. Like she just wants an app to see who's at her doorbell. Like that's it. And it should be easier, but yeah,

I recommend while we're here, the home camera. Is that what it's called? Home camera or home cam? That's it. Home cam app. It's perfect. It's just, it opens up and has a feed of your cameras and you can set up custom controls to have like a three-way feed or two-way feed or whatever you want to set up for your cameras.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, maybe Apple one day will actually develop an actual home app or maybe they'll have a completely separate device that works as kind of like some sort of home hub that'll have some sort of native app and more full experience. They should get on that along with that Face ID camera, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And there was a lot of news this week, a lot of stuff to cover. I thought it was going to be a quick week. Yeah, a lot of stuff going on. I mean –

We're getting into that weird season, right? CES is over, but we just had the whole Mobile World Congress, whatever it's called, the Android side of things. But as we get into the spring, it's about to be just technology stuff over and over and more and more announcements. So a slow trickle of news now while it's getting ready for the pre-announcements. But I expect it's going to be a busy year for this kind of stuff. Matter is growing.

Apple, I think with this Home Hub stuff, I'm with you. We're going to see a big rollout, maybe not now with 18, but with iOS 19 and WWDC in June. You could see a big step up in this space. I'm really hoping for a redesigned Home app with more details on specific controls and systems. That UI, it's so dated at this point. They really should be thinking about

New interfaces. I was looking at it the other day and wouldn't it be interesting if you could just kind of press and swipe on the, cause they're little bars, right? The little, like your lights are just little bars in the interface. Let me just press and swipe on that to raise and lower the brightness. Why I have to tap all the way into it, go into the separate interface, swipe up and down. And it's this whole thing. Um, just feels like there could be more done here and I don't know, maybe we'll see.

Yeah, I agree in a lot of ways. I mean, but I also see other companies, now this is like a reason for Apple to do it, but I feel like we're seeing other companies do, like copy this interface. I think Apple could do a little bit of things that are a little more like delightful with it, like little animations and like kind of press and hold like control center. Like those controls work like that where you can press and hold and then slide like on your brightness or something. So yeah.

That does, like, make it understandable. But I don't know. I actually like the look of the home app in general. It's not bad. It just needs to be – there needs to be – we need more customization, right? The wallpaper stuff not syncing is crazy at this point. They should not be at this level. Not –

able to sync wallpapers i don't understand why that's the situation we need to be able to see more like show me the color information on the like what color is the light right now not on or off like on off and color we need more information on the tiles like there's all kinds of stuff yeah there's little things like that i mean i'm just looking for other basic things that i know i've complained about before but automation's based on activity so like

Right now, you can set like, you know, a camera detects motion and it triggers something. I don't want that. I want it to only detect people. And when it detects people, then trigger an automation. Like if my dog walks through the kitchen, don't turn on the lights for them. They don't deserve the lights. They can see fine. But when I come through in the middle of the night, I want them to turn on at 10% when it's in the middle of the night.

Things like that, or even on the front porch. Before, I tried to set it up where someone walks on the front porch, turns on the porch lights. Seems simple enough, except it can't do that because the automation is only when motion is detected, turn on the lights. So what would happen was if the lights were on or detects a person, whatever, it would trigger, the lights would turn on, then no one's there, so the lights would turn off. But the lights turning off caused a slight delay, which meant that it was...

detecting motion again and the lights would turn back on and it would turn off again. No, I need an automation where a camera. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I just need to detect people and then run an automation and we don't have that yet either. So there's definitely some, you know, low hanging bars that Apple could be able to work on sinking wallpapers, these automations, even historical data for sensors. Why do we have to use a third party app for that? And I don't want to hate on third party apps because they're fantastic. Yeah.

And I love that we have them available to Apple home, but you can't use a third party app to view the,

HomeKit secure video pieces that's only available in the home app and historical data like for Eve sensors and the many others that do support historical data. Those are only shown in the Eve app. So I have to like go into the home app for HomeKit secure video and then Eve app to watch like my temperature graph from overnight. Like there's not even you can't even live in one app if you want to. So there's definitely some low hanging fruit for Apple to get done.

I'm still waiting on some kind of smart triangulation where Apple can use smart signals from your watch and your phone and maybe present sensors. There's some combination of data to intelligently. Maybe this is where Apple intelligence in the home comes into play.

determine where you are in the home. Like when you're walking through the home, know exactly where you are when you speak that way, you don't have to be so precise every time you're giving a command. I know at least when you have the home pods program to a room and you say, turn the lights on, it turns the lights on in that room. That's great, but it shouldn't need to be precise on that side. I mean that I'm glad that that's there right now as a stop gap, but,

But the precision should be coming from the intelligence of knowing where you are. When I cross the threshold from my living room to my dining room, it should just know that I'm now in the dining room and that if the bathroom home pod picks me up from the dining room, it still controls the dining room lights because that's where I physically am in the house, right? So there's so many more things getting these motion sensors and like you said, LIDAR, all of this stuff.

the home pods have more precision they have that ability to is it is it ultra wide band that actually lets you tap your phone to it to switch the connection right like there's so much technology in these devices that there should be more done to intelligently control your home and we're so close to it and that's what's making me so excited for the future in this space like

We're in a rough patch right now where everything's getting moved over to Matter, and Apple's technologies focuses on this Apple intelligence stuff. But I think it's all going to come together, and it's going to be very interesting. I agree.

Well, thank you, Wes, for hanging out today and chatting on the Spart Home. If anyone wants to find anything, there's links for everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes. If you have any questions you want us to talk about or things you want me to answer, you can reach out at Andrew at AppleIncenter.com or on Twitter at Andrew underscore OSU. You can also find me on Blue Sky at Andrew OSU or write a question in the actual chat.

video version of this. So if you want to watch the video version of this, you'll see us emoting with our faces. You can do so over at youtube.com slash homekitinsider. Anything else you want to leave us with, Wes?

Just join us also on the Apple Insider podcast, which comes out every Friday. William and I discuss the news of the week and you can find me on Blue Sky. I'm Hilly Tech everywhere. It's pretty easy to find me. Or you can always just shoot me an email, Wes at AppleInsider.com. You can find that at the top of any article that I've written. Yeah, feel free to reach out, say hi, comment, whatever. But always happy to be on the show. Cool. Give us a 5, 10, 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice and we'll see you on next week's episode.