Robot Vacuums in iOS 18.4, Aqara G5 Pro Camera, & New Lower Nanoleaf Prices
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Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara. I'm riding solo this week ahead of a very exciting episode next week, so be sure you tune in where my co-host will be...

founder of 12 South, Andrew Green. Now, this is going to be... I have followed 12 South for a very long time, and they make a bunch of really great accessories for the home and the office. And more recently, I feel like they've been getting into more, like,

electronics instead of just kind of accessories like cases. There's like electronics going on and now we have find my items and MagSafe chargers from them. So I'm really excited to see where that's going to continue to go, where they're going to continue to grow that kind of like

tech space there? Are we going to see more? Are we going to see smart home items? I don't know, but I'm definitely going to ask. So be sure you tune in for that. It's going to be a great episode. We're going to go through the news and then talk about 12South in general and then smart products and things like that. So yeah, be sure you tune in. Now, we have a ridiculous amount of stuff to talk about for this episode, including what is going on with iOS 18.4 and robotic vacuum cleaners.

Yeah, there is some stuff to break down, some confusion going on, but don't worry. I'm here to clear it up after a lot of discussion with several people. So we'll circle back to that towards the end of the episode.

Before we get into the news for the week, we should also talk about, I have a plug, just a very usual. We have a new video up on the YouTube channel, so youtube.com slash appleinsider. A new video comparing Apple's new rumored Apple TV 4K update to the rumored Sonos set-top box.

All rumors, all speculation, but it's really interesting to me how these two are preparing to launch this year. So if you're interested in streaming and set-top boxes in the smart home, go check that out because it's going live like today, the day that this video drops on Monday, the 24th. So yeah, go check it out up on the Apple Insider YouTube channel. Now, let's get into the news.

So last week was a little bit crazy in terms of what is going on in the world of Apple, but tangentially related to the smart home, we got the iPhone 16E. So not the iPhone SE4, but the 16E. It essentially replaces the SE in the lineup as a new lower cost option, but it does carry a higher price tag than before. Uh...

It's a good upgrade overall in terms of the phone, but that price tag I know is going to keep a lot of people at bay. But there's a few things to point out from a smart home perspective. First up, no MagSafe. This is, I can't even believe it, that they would release a phone without MagSafe. I mean, Apple invented MagSafe. It used that to create Qi 2, and yet they have a new phone and they don't put MagSafe on it.

Maybe Apple thinks it's strong enough, not magnetically, but strong enough to encourage people to upgrade to a 16 for MagSafe. I don't know, but it just seems like such an omission on this device. And there's a lot of discussion about it on all of my coverage that I have done so far, articles and video and tweets. The number one response that I've seen is why is there no MagSafe?

I don't have an answer for that. Maybe magnets are expensive, but it clearly seems to be something that Apple had to cut to keep the cost down. And personally, I think that was one cut too far. I am shocked that they did not include MagSafe here. They even have to come up with their own special chargers for Apple stores. So Mash and Boo shared these images of this new dock for Apple stores that has a white base and a little notch in the bottom. And the phone sits into that and then leans backward against Apple's

A MagSafe puck. Because it still has wireless charging, like the last gen SE, like the last one has the glass back, it could still charge wirelessly at 7.5 watts, but it could not do MagSafe. And the same thing here. So still wireless, still Qi, can still charge on a MagSafe puck, just no magnets built in or the higher wattage charging.

I'm just flummoxed by this. It bothers me quite a bit, but you guys know my feelings on MagSafe and how fond of it I am. So barring that, there's a couple other changes. There is no ultra wideband chip here, no ultra wideband. So if you know precision finding for things like AirTag, so that to me is very surprising. Again, Apple creates their own, you know, U1 chip and everything. I thought that'd be something, but whatever. That is probably an easier cut because not everyone is going to use AirTag

AirTags or precision binding. They still work without that. So I understand that cut that one. I think makes sense more precision for the higher end phones cool. Lastly. This is also understandable thread no thread support here. So if you have thread accessories, you cannot talk to them directly from your phone. They're still going to have to go through that home hub or use Bluetooth or something.

It is a bummer from a smart home perspective, but I don't think many people are going to miss this, let alone realize that it's missing. But yeah, so no MagSafe, no ultra-wideband, and no Thread. If you are a smart home enthusiast, I don't think you're going to be picking up an iPhone 16E anytime soon. But if you are, let me know, and let me know why. I'm very curious on your thoughts.

Well, the next thing is a little bit of a follow-up from last week's episode. I was overjoyed. I was giddy even. You could call me giddy after last week's episode because Netflix was finally integrating into the Apple TV app. I mean, this is fantastic. This is exactly what I want. And it's not just like a rumor that it was coming. It was here. Like, we actually saw it was in the settings of the Apple TV app.

where you could enable this, like the Apple TV app access. And we have screenshots, like here at Apple Insider, staff was able to get the pop-up that said, hey, do you want to allow the Apple TV app to add Netflix to your watch list, your queue? Of course.

Wes and I talked about it on the show, and we were just overjoyed. And then right after, like literally after we recorded, I fell back down to earth as the integration was pulled almost right away. And then following that, Netflix put out a statement saying, we do not plan to support the TV app on Apple TV, and that this was a mistake.

questions. How is this a mistake? How do you accidentally create a feature and then roll it out accidentally when you have no plans to do so? There's theories here, right?

First one could be that that is absolutely true. And somehow there's like it's a back end database system issue used for other things. And it was turned on by accident and cool. The other theory could be that Netflix started working on it, then abandoned it. And some extra code was merged on a new version of the app update that went out and then had to be rectified. Or the third option could be.

This is still coming. This is something that they are working on, maybe for a new version of Apple TV, maybe for a new version of tvOS. Like Apple finally got this deal locked down, like we surmised last week. You know, Netflix is opening up, going to work with Sonos on a similar feature, so maybe they're going to do it with Apple TV. It's going to be a big thing. Apple's going to kind of tout it a little bit and use this as another feature to promote during an Apple TV launch situation.

That could be too. And they right now they're just trying to play it down because it kind of escaped a little bit early. Who knows? Right now, the official word is it sucks and we're not going to get it. So that it is a bummer for sure. But that's where we are. So just recapping. Don't be too excited after I was excited on last week's episode. Netflix is not coming to the Apple TV app.

Next in the news, Aqara is finally launching their G5 Pro camera. This thing looks fantastic. I am very excited to test this out. I should have one probably at my doorstep today to test more, but I got to see it at CES. I was really impressed by it. So there is a Wi-Fi version and there's also a PoE version, so a power over Ethernet version.

I love the PoE option because one, there's not that many PoE cameras in the HomeKit space. There's just not a lot of them. And two, it's just really helpful. So when you're using power over Ethernet,

Everything is run through that single cable. Your internet access, so the streaming access and everything, as well as the power. So you don't have to worry about Wi-Fi signals or plugging it in anywhere. It just does all of that. Just always plugged in, always connected. Great. There's even new versions of like

Shades that use PoE now, which is crazy. We covered on an episode I think couple weeks ago, so I love that Unfortunately me like many others probably doesn't don't have PoE run outside of their house houses for this Now this is something I probably would put in on a new house, but right now I don't have it So I am going to test out the Wi-Fi version of that. It's still a great option and

But no, no POE. So two versions of this that you guys can check out depending on your home setups. POE is amazing and definitely get that one if you have a setup for it. Otherwise, Wi-Fi, plug it in like normal, still going to be great. Indoor outdoor camera has night vision, all this kind of stuff. But great camera coming out of here from Aqara adds to their lineup perfectly.

They have a lot of cameras now, so this definitely adds to the mix. It's $180, so it's not cheap by any means, but it's pretty comparable to other HomeKit or Apple Home cameras that are out there. Plus, it acts as a hub for any of the car products or any other ZigBee Z-Wave thread things that can connect to this. So you've got a bunch of different functionality in here. It looks like a really solid choice. So I'll report back and see how it actually bears.

Then we have Nanoleaf. This is ridiculous news. I could not believe this when I read all of these things. So I like Nanoleaf products. I've got a lot of them. I am staring right now at some elements, tiles going on there, but really cool lights. There's ones for your TV, for gaming, for music syncing, all this stuff. And the one thing that I've always run up against is the price is quite high. I mean, it's not like out of the realm of norm for the industry, but it's pretty high.

Well, they have a new smart life pricing initiative to permanently lower the prices on almost every Nanoleaf product. And that includes, by the way, I had to ask, like includes if any tariff go into effect because they are in Canada, Canada,

who knows how things are going to change politically, but if there are new tariffs that go into place, these prices will still be set. So permanently lowering these, not a temporary sale. And just a couple of these prices, like the elements smarter kit, it goes from two 50 to $250 off there. Um, we also saw some that are basically everything is almost 20%, almost 20% across the board. But some of them, some of these are as high as 36% off. So more than a third of,

off the price tags. So if you are interested, there's a Nanoleaf link in the description or you can just go check out the Nanoleaf website, but all their products have new lower price tag or almost all their products have new lower price tags. So this is huge. If you have been like waffling on some Nanoleaf stuff, you hadn't picked anything up yet or you were like looking at a new light, now's the time to do it.

They have so many like essentials lines. I have a like light strip above me. That is the thread line. So much cool stuff. So go check out some Nanoleaf if you were in the market.

Before we get into the back half of the episode, where I'm going to talk about Matter Vacuum Cleaners, the iOS 18.4 and 18.5 updates, and do a product review, let's go ahead and take our break and thank our sponsor for the episode. It is Shopify. When you think of all these amazing brands, ones like Feastables by Mr. Beast, Thrive Cosmetics, or Cotopaxi. I love Cotopaxi, by the way. Got a lot of cool. I just bought a new Cotopaxi shirt. I didn't even know that they ran on Shopify. But

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So in the news this week, we were getting like the iPhone announcement and we were waiting for the beta to come. Well, it sounded like the beta was originally supposed to release on Tuesday of last week, but it didn't. And everyone thought, okay, what's going on? Gurman says it was pooled for engineering challenges.

Many people just anticipated it would be dropped in the next week, but of course, that didn't happen. If you follow the beta cycle news, you know that Apple actually dropped the beta of iOS 18.4 on Friday afternoon. Yeah, a Friday afternoon beta cycle, and it has a ton of changes in it. But before we get to the changes, we also didn't see one major thing, which is the new version of Apple's Assistant.

This was very highly rumored to be coming in this update. I talked about it confidently for some time. But as we saw that this beta was kind of being pushed a little bit, it was more and more likely that this was going to be missing. And yeah, we got 18.4 in the first beta, and Apple has nothing about the new version of Siri in there. And in fact, Apple brought literally Apple Intelligence to Vision Pro without even mentioning the new version of Siri.

We also have the 16E that came out with Apple Intelligence, but no mention of this more personal assistant that should be coming fairly soon. So yeah, it seems like it's going to miss 18.4. So 18.4 started beta testing already with a release scheduled for likely in April 2021.

Which would mean the new version of Apple Assistant may not arrive until like May or June. Like literally by the time that we get our first beta of iOS 19, we're going to get the new version of Siri.

That is so far away, and I am so crushed by this because that was one of the biggest features for iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence, and it's taken quite a while for things to get done. Now, I understand, totally understand. I'm not going to whine about it because I want things to be right, and that is important and crucial because if Apple rushes things out, they're not going to be good, and they're going to be bug-filled, and there's going to be hate.

No one wants that. We don't need any more hate. So I'm just going to stay optimistic because we have fun things here in 18.4 that we can talk about. Now, if you do want to see everything that is new in this update, I did a full breakdown video of it. But here specifically on HomeKit Insider, we're going to talk about robotic vacuum cleaners. Because while it should be an easy topic, it's not.

So let's go ahead and set the stage here. Robotic vacuum cleaners were first added to Matter in version 1.2. No one other than Samsung has supported them quite yet.

So, Apple has been very far behind in supporting Matter, but it is through Matter that robotic vacuum cleaners will be available in the Home app, where you can use Apple Assistant or the Home app to send it out to clean your home. It could also be included in Scenes, so like maybe when you leave your home, you lock the door, turn off the lights, shut the shades, and run your vacuum cleaner. I think that would be an amazing task to set all with a single HomeKit command.

Well, that is kind of like the ideal world and we just haven't gotten there yet.

Apple actually announced at WWDC 2024 that they were going to be adding support for robotic vacuum cleaners with iOS 18. It was supposed to come out by the end of the year in 2024, and that didn't happen. Apple scrubbed that release or that mention from their website and instead switched it to, like, soon. So it'll be coming here in 2025. So we finally got our first beta of iOS 18.4, and yes, I can confirm that as of now, robotic vacuum cleaner support is here.

So what can you do with this? Well, with the Matter 1.2 implementation, your options are kind of changing the mode like vacuum, mop, vacuum and mop, and sending it out and recalling it. That's kind of what you're limited to. That's kind of why I feel like this was delayed a little bit.

Because, and I have not talked about this on the show, Matter version 1.4 added an additional bit of control for robotic vacuum cleaners. It added something called the service area cluster. And it's kind of what it sounds like. The area that you want your vacuum or your mop to service. So, from my understanding, you can create these rooms...

zones in your robotic vacuum cleaners app like you normally would like we do now and then those will be your service areas that will show in the home app from the home app you can then send it out come bring it back you can change the modes and you can tell it where to clean and

This is huge because a lot of people don't just send out the vacuum and do everything. They specifically want to clean the living room, the kitchen, a bedroom, a dining room, something like that. You don't want to do the whole thing. So I think that's maybe why Apple kind of put a pause on this because 1.4 was announced at the end or released at the end of 2024.

And this, I think, makes so much more sense and it gives you so much more control over these devices as they are cleaning your house. This is huge to me if this is all going to go as planned. It's just going to make this actually usable instead of like a nice to have feature.

It's going to be more robust. Now, we still don't have like syncing of rooms like that you create in Apple Home to your service areas that you're creating in your robotic vacuum cleaner app.

But you should still be able to say, you know, Apple Assistant vacuum the living room or vacuum and mop the dining room, stuff like that, which is exactly what I want to do. That is specifically what I want to do alongside adding it to scenes and automations and everything like that. So what do we have right now? What can you do with this beta if you happen to download it? Well, right now there's only one vacuum on the market that technically supports Matter. And this is again,

unnecessarily confusing switch bot switch bot has a couple different vacuums there's like the s10 and then the k10 k10 plus whatever both of them support matter through a switch bot hub and when they do that they just show in the home app as an on or off switch so it's like technically matter and they're technically in the home app but it's it's a switch kind of like the ice maker doesn't show as an appliance in the home app it just shows as an on and off switch

That's what they would do. But the S10 also has an option to enable matter on the device itself without using a SwitchBot hub. And if you do that, you can add it to the home app as an actual vacuum.

But SwitchBot currently only has their certification on Matter 1.2, which means they currently do not support the service area cluster, while Apple does in the new version of the Home app, at least based on my sources who have spoken to a device manufacturer.

It seems like it is there. So who has this? Roborock and Ecovacs. Both of them have passed the Matter 1.4 certification with service area clusters added for their devices that should be able to be added to the home app once their updates are pushed.

So right now you can buy any of their products and they will not have Matter. But certain models will be updated with Matter and should include service area clusters. I also assume that SwitchBot will update their device as well, but they have not passed that certification yet.

Is this confusing anyone else? It's quite confusing. Honestly, I feel like I'm at home though, because I can talk about these very specific niche details where people hopefully will care about them compared to just rating them on Apple Insider. But that's where we are right now. So if you want to absolutely test this out, the S10 has it. You can test out during the beta shows as a vacuum adds a different category in there. Great.

Then we have the other ones that are going to be coming soon, such as the Roborock and the Ecovac models, like the Saros 10 and 10R I know, and I think it's like the X8 Omni or something from Ecovacs that just launched. That guy will also have this new version of Matter added to it via software update.

When those updates will come, my guess is as soon as iOS 18.4 is released. So plan for April. They could come sooner if they just want to be nice and give them the beta testers, but I'm guessing the public release will most likely coincide with 18.4's release. So yeah, if this all holds true, we're going to be able to actually have robotic vacuum cleaners with room control in Apple Home.

There's still more to do. They can get better. And I actually, I very much applaud Apple for being able to kind of hit pause on that and give us this more full baked experience, even though it's been an agonizing wait for this feature to arrive. On top of all of that with robotic vacuum cleaners, which is, you know, pretty cool. Awesome.

I will have a full breakdown on that, by the way. I should have some early access to things, and if I do, I will give you a good demo of this, and I'll have a full video up on the Apple Insider channel as soon as I can.

Beyond that though, 9to5Mac also found a new device category listed inside of the iOS 18.4 code. This is referencing a new device category for home devices. So currently we have them for like iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Vision products. Those are all different categories. We also have one for audio, which is specifically for HomePods. Now we have this new one called Home. What's going to go in that category?

I think we all know it's going to be Apple's new smart display. That is what's going to fit into that home category. So to me, it sounds like we're getting closer and closer to that launch. More code is sneaking through. I'm backpedaling here, but in iOS 18.4, we also have this new feature in the news app for recipes. It's just called like news plus food. But if you look at the actual recipe cook view, you can't not tell me that it does not look like something designed for an Apple smart display.

Like, it literally gives you, like, these big step-by-step things that take over the whole screen, and there's, like, timers built in. It looks like something that would be on a smart display. Like, I'd have an ingredient list on the left and my recipe on the right, and I could control all with my voice. I 100% believe that is what is going to be the case. I anticipate that is what's going to happen, and this is, like, an early version of this. If you're looking at the video, I'm holding it up, but you can see, like, the massive, like,

the words and the descriptions and the recipe, it's absolutely a smart display for the kitchen.

Would look great with this. I can ease... I'm going to be using this recipe thing all the time. Like, my wife and I, you and my family, we all share recipes from Apple News just out of habit all the time, but there was no really good way to save them and bring them into one place. I'd usually have to kick over to the browser and then move them into, like, Paprika or one of the other really nice recipe-saving apps, but I'm definitely going to be saving some here in Apple News now because of this feature. So...

To circle back, new code, new home category, likely for Apple's new smart display. iOS 18.4 has these features that are going to be coinciding with it, such as the news plus food that looks like it's built for such a display. I don't know how Apple's delayed version of Siri is going to impact that. Maybe we won't see it in the spring. Maybe that's what Kuo was talking about when he said like then last year that this was not going to make into the spring and even Gurman doubling down saying later in the year.

Maybe this is why, because I feel like this device has to launch with this new version of Siri. And without that, it's not going to be fully baked either. That could line up really nicely. So when we get 18.5, we get the smart display maybe in the middle of the year.

I don't know. You guys know what to do. You're just going to have to stay tuned and follow along to keep up to date with all of this and more smart home news. So that is it for this episode. We have a lot of stuff to talk about next week's episode. I am still very excited for. We're going to have hands-on products. We're going to be talking to Andrew Green from 12 South, going over the company and 5G.

find my devices, MagSafe devices, working with Apple, all sorts of crazy things. So if you have questions that you want to ask, let me know. You can let me know on Twitter at Andrew underscore OSU. You can also find me over on Blue Sky at Andrew OSU. You can write me an email, Andrew at AppleInsider.com. You can throw up on the video version of this. You can watch the video version of this at YouTube.com slash HomeKit Insider. And please do what you guys do best, which is give this podcast a 5, 10, 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice.

Otherwise, I'll catch you guys on next week's episode.