Should You Upgrade to Matter, Apple Home Security Systems, & Tonie Box Kid's Speaker Review
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Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. Thank you for joining me. You have me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara, and we again have more exciting episodes coming up, but this week specifically, we have a jam-packed episode to break through like

Holy smokes, so much stuff has happened that we need to talk about. Before we even get into the recaps and the news, I gotta say, like, let's go Buckeyes. Come on, we're not gonna get into the game and everything. The Texas game was really the national championship, but I'm just gonna say, go Bucs. Let's go. I love it. National champs.

Let's do it. Celebration was this weekend in Columbus. Fantastic. Friends were there. I saw a lot of photos. It looked so cool. I wish I could have gone, but we have been out of town, which is kind of the next thing.

that I wouldn't talk about. Just a little bit of a recap. Uh, cause I, I, every time I leave the house, I appreciate a lot of the things that I have at the house. Uh, and some things that work well and some things that don't. So first up, uh, level lock, like this thing has always been a fantastic force, always coming in clutch and no issues with it. Once more, uh,

Mother-in-law, definitely a Luddite. She comes over, uses the keypad, gets right into the home. She checks our animals for us. She checks the chickens because it has been extremely cold temperatures. It's just so good. I love that thing so much. Now we have the Matter update going on, but Levelock, always a fan favorite for a reason. So every time that I can see her approaching on a video doorbell,

That's amazing. Video doorbell, we see somebody there. I can immediately check. Is it a package? Is it my mother-in-law? Who is it? I can see her unlocking the door. She uses her code, so I can even see who that is from the level app. The home app just tells me it was unlocked, but that's good enough. So she comes in.

Does her stuff, goes out to the back, takes care of chickens, all those things. I really love having like that front doorbell, the level lock. The other thing is the back doorbell. I did remember to actually change the batteries on it. Like I did not do before I left for CES and then Faith couldn't check the rear doorbell and I felt terrible. I did change the batteries on the Aqara G4 video doorbell. We'll talk more about Aqara in a few. But

I really like having this back there as well. It just gives you that more, that peace of mind for the back coverage of the house and is entirely battery power where a lot of people don't have, you know, a wired connection for a video doorbell. The other good thing about this too, is that you could wire it if you want to,

But at the same time, I really need the new updated Aqara doorbell that is launching soon because the video angle is just not quite enough. I don't see Naomi. I can see her opening the rear door because of the contact sensors saying that it's

alerting me that it's being opened, but I can't see her walking out. It's too far to the side and it doesn't trip on the camera. So that's one thing that I know that they have fixed in the new version. The new version can act as a hub and has a wider field of view. So I'm excited for that to be able to upgrade this one and kind of fill that void because it is one thing that I've noticed a few times and I would like to see, you know, kind of changed.

Lastly is my outdoor weather sensor, which again, we're going to come back to. But I've been using like the Eve, I think it's the Eve, is this Eve Degree, Eve Weather? One of those two, but it's the Eve Outdoor Sensing. Does you know your humidity, temperature, stuff like that. And I really, really like it. And it was really cool because I could just ask, you know, Apple's assistant, what's the temperature on the porch?

You don't have to use like a weather station or anything else that's like nearby, like a weather service. It's literally telling you what your temperature is at your house. And we could do that even when we were out of town, like we're in New York for a few days and I could still check in at home and see the actual temperature it is.

At my house. Nowhere else. Nowhere kind of close to us. No, specifically at my house. And I even have my mother-in-law. She's like, oh, I'm driving down the street and I can see how my truck gets this temperature and this temperature and this temperature and all these different spots. And I can actually see the weather at the house and a little graph. Like when I got home, I was able to sync up with my, you know, Eve sensor here. And it shows me all my past temperatures that it's been getting on the little chart. So I can actually see how it's changed because it's been incredibly cold. I mean, like,

below zero negative 20 something degrees at times, especially when you're factoring in windchill. So it was, it was amazing to see how to, to capture that temperature. And I loved it. So I liked having this as well at the house and some things I like to fix.

The other thing that I did a lot of was running vacuums while we were gone. It's nice to have vacuums that you can use to really clean the house. I did have an unfortunate circumstance. We walked in and we saw RoboBurt, which as many people may know is what we call our RoboRock vacuum around the house. Poor RoboBurt had found a cord.

It did it. It doesn't happen very frequently at all, but Harrison must have left the, he likes to get into the dog cart. We have like a cart full of dog,

dog things, whether it's like their nail trimmers or like their charger for their beeping collars or like doggy bags, leashes, all that stuff. And he always takes everything out of there. And I know this thing must have fallen on the bottom. One of the little cords stuck out and RoboBurt sucked it up. One of those little ends was caught in the roller. This never happens, but I could literally see how it happened too, because it must have been on the side brush that was going under the lip of

of the bins because like a cart so it must have spun out use that little side brush to grab the end of it which pulled it underneath and then sucked it into the main roller at the bottom so we walked into a poor disabled robo-bert sitting at the front door completely depleted the battery uh and life it was sad so poor robo-bert this does not happen

at all, but this is still a thing that does happen to robotic vacuum cleaners. And because of this weird situation of it kind of like being half under the cart, I don't even know if this could have been avoided with the new versions of the RoboRock that are coming out or any others because you can't even really see it where it happened to have been placed. But, you know, these are the odd things that happen with robotic vacuum cleaners.

Just something that happens every once in a while and you gotta deal with it. But of course it happened to happen when we were out of town and I wasn't able to run it the rest of the time, you know, to clean the rest of the floors.

Going back to the last episode again, we had a lot of love and I just loved seeing this. There was so much love for the Snazzy Labs video on Matter and the problems with it and Apple Home and all that kind of stuff. Quinn does an amazing job. So again, props to Quinn for that. If you didn't check it out from the last episode, I had a lot of people writing in about it, comments on the YouTube video just saying how great Apple

He did explaining all of that. So if you're curious on the matter and some of the problems that we're facing and you don't want to try to find it in all the backlogs of the podcast, go check out that video. It is linked on the last episode. Another tip from two episodes, I want to say.

I talked about the car lock that we use on our bedroom. So this is the, I think U300 maybe has like the fingerprint sensor, the keypad works with home key. So you just tap my watch to get in because there were times that I was using my thumb and it wasn't always registering whether my hands were dry or wasn't positioned correctly. Just the random odd times. And when it didn't do that, I'm like, just home key is easier. Well, we had a tip from, I got to read the username, but it's hail skunky.com.

Hail Skunky wrote in on YouTube with a great tip, which is to re-enroll that finger, but not just redo it, do it as a second or third finger. So basically the same finger is enrolled multiple times.

The idea is no matter which way it kind of does it, it'll have like three fingers to be checking against and you'll have very few like false negatives on your finger. So I think that is a great tip. If you have that lock and you're experiencing any false finger or any false negatives that you're putting a finger on there, it's declining, re-enroll it as a new finger. And you can even do that like maybe three times and that really should cut that down.

I think that is really interesting. That'll work with any smart lock that has a fingerprint reader, by the way. Just re-enroll as a different finger. Should cut down those. So, love it. Thank you, Hail Skunky, for sharing that tip. I've recently talked about the Schlage Sense Pro, and things have gotten interesting. So, I actually got a note from Schlage with a couple things to mention again, and this is a little bit new. So,

They actually say that the new Schlage Sense Pro will support Alero once it launches, not a new version of the lock, right? That's...

We just talked about the Utech version that used ultra wide band and their whole spiel was, Hey, the spec isn't finalized. The chip isn't finalized. We cannot build a lock. Now that's going to have that chip in it because we don't for sure know what it's going to be. We're not going to make any promises right now on if that would be even possible, but we will release a new version that will support a Lero once that's done.

Well, Schleg is saying, no, we're going to do it. We're going to do it somehow. So they're claiming this will support Alira once it's released. You will not have to buy a new version. So if you were looking to get this now, then again, this is not available right now. They're just saying it's available later this year. So we don't have a target date. Maybe this is targeting later half of this year when things are more finalized. That's why they're able to do that. Whereas the

Utech 1 is going to be launching very, very soon. So maybe that's the difference is that the Utech coming out now versus the Schlage Sense Pro coming out later in the year. That's possible. But either way, when the Schlage Sense Pro launches, it'll be Matter over Thread and has tapped to unlock the NFC. They didn't specifically say home key, but at least tap to unlock the NFC.

Continuing with the Apple news, this is just going back and forth with this, people. This is not really back and forth, I guess, but we just have so many news, it's hard to believe or it's hard to know what to believe at this point. But Apple's smart home hub, the one with the actual touch display and the

interchangeable bases and wall mounting and all that kind of crazy tech in it. Well, Gurman came out with his typical report on Sunday saying that this is still on track for a release this year. And they'll be going into production to hit for late this year. That does line up with main cheese quo latest supply chain reports, which said later this year is when production will be starting on this. So now it seems like quo and Gurman are both on the same page going into production and,

for a launch later this year. This is probably, in my opinion, going to be like their biggest launch of the year if the 17 Air type phone isn't. I think this is going to be huge. This is going to be a huge product for them. I think it's going to be a big deal. Apple intelligence, the smart home, it's going to have FaceTime integrations and security implications, all this kind of stuff. I think it's going to just be

a massive product for them. I think it's going to be really, really cool. And we're going to get it this year. As long as it still stays this year, I will be happy. As long as it's not a CarPlay situation that gets punted yet again for CarPlay 2.0. We didn't make it in 2024. We'll see if anything happens in 2025. Apple says they are continuing to talk to multiple car manufacturers, but that is not...

Not really comforting to me, I guess. More in the news, Hue has a new update out for its app on the App Store. So this specifically is for their smart home cameras, but it allows you to arm and disarm your system via a schedule. This is very cool. So if you have any of the Hue cameras and security system type stuff, and you want to be able to arm it and disarm it on a schedule, now you can with the latest version of its app. So small little update there.

Smart wings. Now I've been getting pitch smart wings stuff for a while and I've yet to try them. So tell me if I should, but they just released a new set of smart shades and these new ones, this is wild. They support power over ethernet and matter. So it's, it's matter enabled smart shades using power over ethernet, which is conveniently named power,

Matter over Ethernet. You might see it abbreviated as a capital M, a lowercase O, and a capital E. Similar to how power over Ethernet is capital P, lowercase O, capital E. MOE. Matter over Ethernet. This is nuts. If you're building your smart home, I can see how you can build this in, and it makes sense. Because...

Everything is taken care of. So you could go with like wired shades, right? Wired shades are a thing. They have been a thing. But what we're seeing here is now power over Ethernet and matter over Ethernet to give you your power and your connectivity at the same time. And we're getting matter slash Apple home support in it all in one package.

By going with power over Ethernet versus a battery or solar, there's no solar panels you have to affix to windows that can look ugly from the outside. There is no...

Battery that you have to replace and swap and recharge anything like that. Like it is always annoying. Literally today as I'm recording this, I needed to close the shades in the studio and I for the first time in I don't know how long my Hunter Douglas shades battery was dead. It lit I couldn't it's been like years since.

since I've changed that battery. So like battery life has been great, but of course, like I go to need them. And that is when I find out that the battery's dead. Cause you don't notice when you're not using them. So it is really annoying when that happens. I have to go and take out the battery, charge it, and then put it back in before I can do anything. It's kind of obnoxious. So with a POE or MOE version of this,

You don't have to worry about it at all. You don't have to worry about thread. You don't have to worry about wifi connections, hubs, nothing like that. It's completely plugged, plugged in, handles all your networking, handles your communication and handles the power of,

at the same time. So I'm really interested in these. I don't have any way to use them. Like I'm not running POE lines to make this happen in my home. I'm not going to, but if you're doing a new build or at least a reno of some sort, this may be something to consider. So smart wings, these are, these are being released and I think it is very cool if you have a situation where these make sense. So if anyone tries these, be sure to let me know.

Acara. I told you we were revisiting Acara and man, I need to take a sip of water before I break down this massive list of new Acara releases here for the EU market. So Acara is releasing seven new devices specifically for Europe.

We also have seen many of these devices already launched in China, or there's very similar versions for the Chinese market. And earlier this year, I also saw many versions of these for the U.S. market. So, you know, we're going to get these sooner or later here in the U.S., but there's some really cool ones, and I just want to talk through them and walk through them. So you know what you're getting. We have a lot of EU listeners out there and a lot of, you know, U.K. listeners out there, but I can't promise these are making it to the U.K. market.

So most all of these are Zigbee or Matter Over Thread. So they do have that for connectivity. If they're Zigbee, you're going to need to have an Aqara hub. If they're Matter Over Thread, they can work directly or you can still use them with the hub for usually some additional features.

So starting off, we have an E26-27 bulb. These are 1100 lumens, and it comes in two different versions. One color, so full color spectrum, all the bright colors, everything like that. The second version of it has the tunable whites, so more of the warm white to the cool white schedule, all of it. I don't know if these support Apple's adaptive lighting. Usually these are all Apple Home, so I imagine that it could. A car is pretty good about that, but I don't overpromise.

The second set of new products are two more bulbs. There's a set of new GU10 bulbs. They are 450 lumens this time. And again, a color version, full color spectrum, and then the tunable whites. So four bulbs so far being released.

Then we have the H2 smart switch. I guess this technically counts as two products again, because it has one or two channel versions. So two versions of the H2 smart switch. It's kind of a little square, nothing too fancy, but smart switch, a thread Zigbee, the usual there. Okay. Now we're getting to the fun ones.

We have the display switch V one. So it is a, a, a switch. I believe it replaces two switches in your wall. And like in the middle of it kind of is like a little, a display, like a full color LCD display. And you can display a bunch of different information there. So display in the middle works with Apple home. There's two different switches that you can control, but there's also four programmable buttons that,

built into it. So you could set those to any automations you want. They show into the home apps. You could use them to control shades or scenes, anything like that that you want to tie to those buttons, just pure programmable buttons. This one does not have thread. It is just Zigbee. So it does have to have an Aqara hub to go with it. And it does require a neutral wire. So just to be aware, because I know a lot of people don't have neutral wires.

Then we have the touchscreen dial V1 EU.

So this can replace two switches on your wall and it's a round dial that you twist and rotate to control your devices. So for example, you could dim your lights via the dial, like turn it to the left to dim, turn it to the right to brighten. You can also control up to 18 Aqara devices using the middle display. So the middle is a display. The outside is like this ring. It's a touchscreen. So you can control all these different Aqara devices if you have a bunch of them throughout your home.

On top of that, there are six programmable buttons on the display itself. So aside from like your car devices, there are six buttons that are exposed that are programmable via Apple help. So you can set those to additional scenes to control your other non-Akara devices. Last one, we have the Akara Panel Hub S1+.

This replaces two wall switches. And frankly, this is the one I'm most excited about. It is similar to Apple's, you know, rumored new hub that is coming, but it's just a large, wide slab of glass. It's a beautiful looking display. I did see a version of this in person at CES and I really, really want it. What I didn't know actually at CES is not only can this be

mount it into your wall and replace those two switches, but it can also be freestanding and run over USB-C. So I could have this on my desk running over USB-C. It can have a live feed of any of your Aqara cameras.

There's quite a bit of those now between the doorbells and we're getting, there's multiple indoor cameras of the G3 and the G2 hub versions. But then there's going to be the outdoor cameras, the G5, all those that are launching. So there's like, there's a lot of cameras that are all into the Aqara hat now, and you'll be able to stream them alive on this hub S1 plus.

If you have the doorbell, you can actually use this as an intercom. So you can see when someone approaches doorbell, press the button, you can answer the doorbell on this and talk to that person on the other side. So pretty cool. I love all of that. Now, from my understanding, when I talked to everyone at CES was this would also be a matter hub or a matter controller. So you would be able to control and see your matter devices on this as well.

I'm hoping that is still the case. I'm hoping that is accurate, but that's going to be a game changer because then anything that you have under Apple Home that is Matter, you could see on this and control. So we're going to come back to that again in the second half of this episode, but just keep that in mind. Now we're starting to get these displays, these controllers that can do a lot more stuff with Matter.

The last piece of news to chat about before we get into a couple other topics is some unfortunate news for Siri and why it may be looking a little bit more positive than

So Siri has failed massively this cognitive test for the Super Bowl. So this was done by a one-foot tsunami. And basically they went out and they asked for just to start, who won Super Bowl XIII? And Apple's assistant came back with the Eagles.

It was not the Eagles. You don't have to go check. You don't have to ask your, you know, Siri. It was not the Eagles. And this kind of prompted them to go run it back and ask like all the Super Bowls who won. And out of all of these, Apple's assistant only got 20 of like 60. Correct. 20. That's terrible. And I don't know what.

These just seem like basic questions. I'm not sure if Apple's assistant doesn't understand how Roman numerals work, and that's why it was confused and why it did so poorly and why it was able to get some but not others. But this is just the stuff that we get frustrated by. I really like Siri. It does a lot of great stuff, works really well, is responsive, can do all this stuff offline.

Lots of benefits. Like the other day, I'm trying to pull up a show on my Apple TV and I said, I can't remember what it was. I wish I could. I think it might have been like the show 9-1-1 because there's like there's 9-1-1, 9-1-1 Lone Star. I think I pulled it up and it's like, oh, if you're worried about your mental health, please contact somebody. I'm like, no, I'm like the show 9-1-1 and it couldn't do it.

It was giving me like, you know, warnings, which are, which are great to have, but there I'm like TV show this and it wasn't able to figure it out either. And this has happened multiple times when I'm trying to find something. So when people say like, Oh, why do we need like a new Apple TV? Because we need Apple intelligence on there that can hopefully, hopefully eventually make Apple's assistant a bit smarter and can handle, uh,

Some fairly rudimentary questions. And it happens more and more, it seems, or maybe just because I'm noticing more because I'm getting frustrated a little bit more, but it happens too much. It's happened to me on the Apple TV, it's happened to me on my phone, and now we have something like this that just frankly makes Apple's assistant look really stupid. And Apple often has sponsored the Super Bowl.

Like, Oh, you want to hear music from this artist? Do this. You want to ask questions about the Superbowl? Ask, you know, ask and get some stats. And here's a really easy one. Who won this one? And it can't even tell you that.

So it is pretty abysmal. But I guess the good side of this happens to be on Sunday where Mark Gurman came out and said that Apple is working on improving both Apple Intelligence and Siri in some substantial ways. So Kim Virath, who has been at Apple for ages, I think she joined in like 87 or something like that, is like an intern and then quickly grew through the ranks. She worked in like the original iPhone, like the software for the original iPhone. She's worked on Vision Pro.

Well, now she's moving over to the Apple intelligence and Siri teams. She'll be reporting to Apple intelligence and Siri chief, John G. Andrea. So we have that chain of command and she is basically known for keeping her work on schedule and for implementing rigorous bug testing.

We use what we need here. So this will be really interesting to see how Apple starts to shape these, these new features and can improve things going on. Apple has been doing the AI machine learning stuff for ages and people are just now kind of starting to catch onto it. But as competitors like Samsung and Google, uh,

are really pushing their stuff forward and making it very visible, Apple needs to at least perceptively play catch up and fix some of these obvious errors and mistakes. So I'm very interested in seeing how this continues to develop.

By the way, as an aside, the new Samsung devices, are you kidding me? Still no Qi 2? Still no Qi 2? Like, what are they doing at this point? I mean, they've had years to add Qi 2 to their devices, and they still can't figure it out. But yet they know Qi 2 needs to be a thing, so they're saying, oh, look, our devices are Qi 2 ready, which literally just means...

put a case on it that has magnets and it'll work. So if you're someone like me who doesn't use cases on their devices and wanted to have, you know, cheat to support, you couldn't do it. You couldn't do it because it doesn't support it. And they've had cases around for years. Basically since MagSafe launched, we started seeing Android cases with the magnets. So they say you can get the same speeds and it has the magnets in the cases and

but I just don't get it. I just don't get it. I had someone, I've been doing a lot of TikTok shorts and YouTube shorts and whatever on different chargers. So I showed this really cool charger from nimble that I like. And everyone's like, Oh man, I love not everyone. Some people, I love this, but why does it have a, an Apple watch charger on there? Why doesn't have a Samsung charger for my Samsung smartwatch? Because your phone still doesn't support. She too, like,

It doesn't, people are using the cases to get it done, but they're not like they weren't even advertising until these new S25 series. And even then they're still just saying compatible or Chi Tu ready, unless I miss something. Cause again, I was out of town.

From my understanding, they just don't support it yet. And I think it's ridiculous. So, yeah, a product that came out, you know, weeks ago before the Qi 2 Ready S25 line and still before that, nothing was ever supported. Yeah, of course, none of these 3-in-1 chargers do it because Apple has been supporting since iPhone 12. iPhone 12 is Qi 2 certified. And, you know, we're on the 16 and we still don't have it on the Android devices. So...

Okay. I got off my soapbox. Now that I'm off my soapbox, let's thank our sponsor for the episode. You know you love them. It is Shopify. Now, I've been an Apple insider for a few years, but before that, I worked kind of at a lot of startups. And if not a startup, a large company that is basically building a department from the ground up. And I have gone through that whole process of looking at the technology that you need to scale your business.

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We've had this for a little while now. Harrison's been playing with this. A little bit of baby tech before pivoting back to more Apple Home-related things. But I wanted to still talk about this because I think it's really cool because it's smart home tech that's decidedly low tech and is great for the kids. So this is the Tony box. If you're watching the video, I'm holding it up. But it's a red box. I would say like...

six inches or so uh cube six inch cube and it's soft on all the sides it's very squishy i can hit myself in the head with it and i feel very comfortable doing this i am not losing that many brain cells every time that i smack myself um on the front of it is a little speaker that is cut out in the shape of like a character there are little ears on the top little pointy ears and then the top is a little magnetic surface so you get something like one of the characters i just happen to have um

What's his name? Lightning McQueen here from Cars. And you just place him right there on the top. He magnetically holds into place so your kid can just put it there. It'll recognize that character via NFC and then start playing music or stories, whatever like that. You can squeeze the ears to go volume up and volume down, and you can tap on the sides of the box to skip tracks.

That's basically how it works. Lastly, it does charge on the bottom. It's just a standard barrel connector. So it's literally just a standard barrel connector that's on like a special base. So it kind of inserts into a little bit. Magnetically can hold into place, but just charges up that way. So no, nothing fancy, no like wireless charger, nothing like that. That's probably one of my...

complaints about it, I do wish it had something like G2, a regular wireless charger instead of like an actual hole on the bottom because I feel like it's easier to get damaged. A kid's going to shove a crayon in there or something like that. Same thing is like when you have a USB port on kids' devices, I recommend it. They can still get damaged. So having a port on the bottom like that can still be damaged even though there's no screen to crack or anything like that. Something can still break. So I

Uh, preferable, a magnetic wireless charger, but this has been out for a little while now. This is not exactly new. This has been out for several years. So I think maybe, and maybe the version two. So Tony box, if you're listening, G2 15 watt, at least wireless charger on the bottom for this should be, should be great. It would be a great upgrade to keep a little bit more kid friendly, longer lasting.

The other things of the things that I like about it, super easy to use, right? You just add that character on there, works right away. They also have a ton of licensed characters, and they're all very well done. Like, lightning here, a lot of detail going into, like, the underside, the wheels, like, the graphics. And I think I heard that they're all basically, like, hand-painted. Like, they're all, like, little models, kind of. And, yeah. Yeah.

Like you can see a little bit of like the stripes going down, like they're not perfect, but in like a good way, like they don't look at their like stamped incorrectly and like a cheap way. It looks like they were just like hand painted on there and it goes up a little bit and just gives them a little bit of charm. I actually really like the little characters.

They're also very widely available. You can pick these up in many, many stores, including like Target and Walmart. So if you're buying one, it's really easy to add additional characters because so many places have them in the physical stores. I really like the Yodo box. That's also a great one, but those cards aren't as widely available as these Tony box characters.

There's also the create your own Tonys that you can get that are like essentially blanks. And you can use the app to record your own voices and extra stuff and put that into the character. And then when they place that on the top, it can be you reading them a story, singing them songs, or you could record music. My son loves the music, as many of you know. So I can sit there and, you know, I have a lot of Elvis songs. I could just

Put them into there, into the app, and I could just tie those in there as the audio files. And I've created my own like music Tony. So I could just set one there and it would just play Elvis songs for the entire time or Queen songs. Like those are some of his favorite ones right now. So it would be a really easy thing to do. So those are the things that I like about this thing. There are some downsides, though.

So the way these things work is they are connected to the Wi-Fi. So when you first put the Tony on the top of the box, it essentially registers it. And then it'll go ahead and download the songs or the stories, spoken stuff, to the Tony box itself. So it does do that over your home Wi-Fi. So it means if you take this somewhere else, put a new Tony on it, you're not going to be able to do it because it doesn't have, like, the local Wi-Fi. So you have to, like,

Maybe change it or just wait to get home to put the new Tonys on there. The second thing is there's no way to see the status of these. So if you have like a longer one or maybe you did the create your own Tonys and you have like a lot of content that's taking a little while to download, there's no way to see if it's like done, half done, finished, anything like that. Just kind of gives you that status that it's like it registered it and it started, but there's no progress.

So the Tony box that I mentioned or the, the Yodo players that I mentioned, they can, you can actually put a new card in and they work the same way. There's like an NFC reader. You put in a little like credit card shaped thing and it downloads the stuff from online, but you can actually see all the tracks and they're,

their download status in the app and I can actually see and manage what is saved to that yodo player you can't do that with a tony box so you can't you just can't see how the progress is going if it got interrupted your kid you know switched it or put like three on and like if you if you got a bunch for christmas and they put it on there and they are nothing happened right away put the next one on oh nothing happened right away put the third one on

All those tracks are still downloading in the background, supposedly, but you just can't see their statuses or anything like that. Kids are a little impatient, so it would be nice to see that confirmation in a way to manage that through the companion app. The other, and this is a big or a small issue depending on who you are, that is the older characters don't have the OG voices.

So if you're looking at this kind of went viral online for not great reasons, a lot of people were getting like Tony boxes and they got like Toy Story characters and they put like Woody on there and they're expecting, you know, Randy Newman to sing. You've got a friend in me. Instead, you have a pretty poor Randy Newman impersonator singing. You've got a friend in me.

It's not a great look, and I hate it because as a parent of a certain age, you know, a lot of those early Pixar and Disney movies are what we love. And those are the characters that we kind of push on our kid. And the fact that you can get those characters and then you can't hear the actual voices or the songs is a huge bummer. I know a lot of people who have, like, gotten rid of their Tony boxes because of that.

The good news is basically all the new ones, they're all the real voices. My guess here is that Tony boxes, they could buy the rights to the characters or maybe even the songs, but not to the voices. That could just be a whole extra...

It could be more expensive. Starting off, they couldn't afford those types of things. I don't know. That's pure speculation. But now they're doing really well. They're incredibly popular. Harrison likes this thing quite a bit. So I can see now why the new characters, they do have the actual songs, the actual voices. So maybe newer kids who are actually...

leaning into new Disney, you know, they're going with, uh, with Coco, they're going with, um, you know, what's Bruno, uh, Alcanto. Uh, they went with all those types of ones and anything else going forward. Moana, those types of things. They should be all good. There's all, I got all the cool stuff, all the new voices and everything they'd expect. And it won't even matter.

So, just depends on your preference. I just don't want anyone to be surprised. They pick one of these up, get an older character, and run into that. There's also always the chance that maybe they'll redo them. They'll redo different characters or swap the tracks. Anything like that. I don't know. I'm not speaking for them, but there's no reason, not that they're big enough, if that's a problem. Maybe they'll redo it. Especially with ones like Toy Story. That's the one that I want them to redo. Yeah.

That's just me. Or maybe not just me. But yeah. So Tony box, if you've got kids and you're looking for something that's kind of techie, like the speaker, it's like for me, it's like, Oh, this is wifi. There's an app. There's NFC. Like there's a lot of cool tech being built into this for something that for my kid is just basically a giant speaker that plays his favorite songs. So yeah,

Really neat stuff if you haven't seen them. I guess last thing, they do have a headphone jack. So they do sell headphones or you can get any other wired headphones like buddy phones, whatever you have, and plug those in and listen via headphones as well. So you don't have to have it on the speaker. Next that I want to talk about, I said we'd be coming back to the whole Matter Upgrade thing. So I've got my EVE Degree, my EVE Weather, whichever one this was, because I still can't remember what they actually call the outdoor version off the top of my head.

But I was checking the status on it and I hadn't pulled in the data in a while. And I was specifically to do that, to see the graphs over time, you have to do that through the EVAP. So I will use my voice all the time to ask Apple Assistant what the temperature is on the porch.

Very convenient, but I rarely looked inside of the Eve app for the historical data. But with the weather being really low, I wanted to see how it had been changing. So I connected to it just by opening the Eve app, going to the Eve weather in there, and viewing the historical data. And it also gave me the alert to upgrade to Matter.

Ages ago on the show, Steven and I had a discussion and Steven's stance was he was not upgrading his devices to support Matter because when Eve first started doing theirs, it was like, okay, everything is working great under HomeKit. Why would I move it to Matter? You're essentially adding that extra application layer that's going between the device, Matter, to Apple Home. Why do that instead of just sticking with pure Apple Home? We've had issues with Matter.

understandably. So I kind of wanted to revisit this question here because I'm still standing as staring at, as we speak at the button that says upgrade to matter. And the question is, do I press it or do I not press it? And I was thinking about a lot, just, just going into this episode. I'm like, do I press it? Do I not press it? Do I stick Apple home? But I think, I think I'm going to press it.

So if you're watching, you can see me press the button right there. Upgrade to Matter. Upgrade to Matter on this. And here's my thinking at the moment. We have more and more devices like what we just saw from Aqara that are going to be Matter controllers. And I think it's going to make sense to have everything upgraded to Matter. I think that's going to be...

the most reliable and the way that you're going to get extra control over these devices. My, my goal and my hope is that this little box here on my porch will be able to give a live temperature reading to my Akara hub that could be sitting right here on my desk because this will be a matter device and it'll be able to show my matter temperature on this. That way everything just plays together and,

And when you pull at that thread, no pun intended, it brings me to a second question, which is, should you upgrade existing devices to Matter? And I don't mean via software like ones you currently have that offer a route to Matter.

I'm talking about replacing a physical device you have that perhaps works just fine. Should you replace it, pay for a new version that has MatterBaked in? And of course, there's a lot of baggage that comes with that because it depends like financially where you're at. Like, oh, can you afford those things? And say, if you can afford them, still doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense to do that. And I'm...

I'm really on the fence. I really am because I'm seeing things like, uh, like the Lutron shades. I have the Lutron Serena shades in the living room. And if I have something like the, uh, the Akara panel there, and I want to be able to control those, I can't because they're not working directly with Akara. So I can't control them on there. I could possibly set up like an automation via a button to control the shades, but they won't be able to do to integrate perfectly because they're not matter enabled shades.

Now, for me, I can't do that because those were very expensive for those Lutron Serena shades because it's like a six-foot something window. It was going to be near impossible to swap that out with a new matter-enabled version. It was going to be very expensive to try to pull that off.

So I, for something that big, I'm not going to do it, but I am looking at other devices like some light switches that are currently home kit. And, you know, I may want to swap them out for some matter ones. Same thing with some smart plugs. I have some smart plugs here in the studio that are wifi enabled. I devices ones. And I am sitting here thinking like maybe I should swap those out for some newer. I could, they could even be thread. I don't really care. Thread and wifi are both just as good to me.

But I could go with Matter versions and give me more control as we get to these new things. I mean, if you're looking just for the Apple hub, the Apple smart home command center, you're fine. You do not need to worry about upgrading to new Matter devices or upgrading software wise to Matter. You're safe as is. You don't need to worry about it. You're good because those devices are always going to work together just fine.

But if you are someone who's like, man, I kind of want like my smart switch to be able to control things. Like you want to see like a smart display from other manufacturers or you're in a house that has multiple control systems. Like you have like the Google homes and the, the Samsung and the Apple all at the same time. And you want them to be able to work together a little bit more. Then yeah, it does make sense to upgrade things to matter.

So there are certain devices in the house that I, that I want to start switching the matter. I've always said with Apple home, like I love how long these devices last, which is great. But now we're in a spot where I'm like, I might actually need to upgrade some of them. Most of my smart home devices. I have not upgraded like my home kit devices. I have had, I have had, I've had them the entire time. I have the original Eve motion sensor that launched like,

10 something years ago, I'm pretty sure. And it still works just fine.

That is one thing I did upgrade because we have new ones that are present sensors that work a lot better like the new ones from Aqara. So for some things I have upgraded, but they literally have lasted this entire time. So it's kind of interesting because I feel like for the first time I'm really in a spot where I'm like, hey, maybe I should upgrade a couple of these smart home devices. And I'm curious of what you guys think if you're going to start making that move to more Matter devices, are you going to be buying stuff that specifically only works with Matter?

I don't know. Just let me know, you know, the usual place like Twitter, Blue Sky, or the YouTube version of this podcast. Finally, to wrap up this episode, I also wanted to bring up security systems because it's another common thread that I saw over at CES, and it's been really kind of bouncing around in my brain a little bit on just how I feel about security systems and what makes sense.

Security systems right now fall into basically three camps. The first one is it's a faux security system. So something like you have a few contact sensors, you have a video doorbell and you have some security cameras and you use that as basically your security system.

You monitor everything yourself. You don't worry about it. The second option is you have like an Apple Home security system. There are really two out there that do this. So you have the Abode Iota, which is what I have used for the longest time. I'm holding it up if you're watching the video version of this, but it's basically a, I don't know, 10-inch tall.

inch tall cylinder type squared off cylinder type thing where there's a camera at the top and a speaker on the bottom. There is a ethernet port on the back. There's also a spot to put in a SIM card where you can actually connect it to cellular and there is an SD card slot for local storage.

I really like this. You basically buy a bunch of abode security sensors, motion sensors, door sensors, things like that. And this is an actual security system that works inside of Apple Home. So you can arm it, disarm it, all of that. There is a keypad. There are key fobs that you can put on your keychain to arm and disarm as you come home and everything. You can set up like nice little automation. So you get you pull in the driveway, you hit unlock, turns off your security system, unlocks your door,

All those types of deals, but it all works natively like in Apple home, but it's also like a legit security system. And they even have optional monitoring. You can do it for like short periods of time. Like I'm pretty sure you could do it for like a weekend or a week or something, or you can do a longterm option if you need to. So multiple options for professional monitoring as well as you monitoring and

The other one besides a abode is the, uh, a Cara systems. A Cara has a security system that can essentially show inside of the home app, uh, arm, disarm, all that kind of stuff per usual. Just use the, a car sensor, a car sensors works in a very similar way.

So those are the two that are under the, you know, Apple home umbrella. And then there are others that are outside of Apple home that potentially have more features. So we have the, probably the two biggest ones that I hear a lot of people talk about are ADT and simply safe. Simply face has been quite popular recently. It's very easy to self install. It is very affordable and,

Then you have ADT, which has been, I feel like a little bit on the rise recently because they had this big partnership with Google that's kind of dissolved a little bit. They were just basically, you could either go with like a professional installation or your option was a bunch of Google devices and that was like your option.

now they actually have new hardware and like a new platform from my understanding. And they have some really nice new features, including like trusted neighbor. So with like this trusted neighbor thing, if there's ever anything that happens like at your house, you can have like your neighbor can come over. It'll automatically like authenticate them, give them access to your house, turn off the security system, allow them to like,

Turn off your sink or your stove or turn off a light, put out a fire, whatever little thing is going on and then leave and it'll automatically arm the security system, lock the door, do everything behind them. So it's a really nice whole automation. Like it's very contained and works really smoothly. So it's a really cool process as well.

Then, of course, they have professional monitoring that you can opt into if you'd like. So you have those two. SimpliSafe also has monitoring, by the way. So it's like a professional solution with monitoring. So those are kind of like the outside of Apple Home. And I'm super curious at where people fall on this. Like, where do you want your security to be?

Personally, I sit just below professional monitoring. That's why I was going with the Abode Iota because I could put this system in my house. I had the cameras. I had all the contact sensors. I could arm and disarm. And then when I'm away...

I can also pay for the professional monitoring to help give me added peace of mind, but I didn't have to use it all the time. I'm pretty good about checking notifications. Like if I can see something at the door, anything like that, I am on it and I am checking it out. And I have enough things at this house, like to cover every square inch of it. I know when someone is at the house, they're coming around the outside, anywhere around this house,

I know about it and I feel like I can step in and see it. And of course, if I'm sleeping, I'm not going to. And that's where professional monitoring would come in. But if I'm at home, I feel like I can help. I can control it a little bit better versus when I'm away. So when I'm away, I like to have that professional monitoring as an option. But I'm just very curious. And it's a tough decision between really going with something that works with Apple Home and

and professional monitoring because ADT and simply say for the two bigger ones, perfect for professional monitoring and more robust systems with more features, just no Apple home integrations. And with ADT, especially I, I can't believe they don't even have things like Siri shortcuts, integrations for arming and disarming and some of that stuff. So,

I don't know. This is something that I've really just been debating about what to do at the house, and I'm probably going to pull the trigger on something. I'm just not sure which way I lean yet, and I don't know if this is like waiting for matter to start investing more into security systems, so we'll see more with Apple Home, but that's going to be years away before something like that fully plays out.

So right now, it's just kind of like this open discussion that I have in my own head with what makes the most sense, what makes the most financial sense, the most security sense that plays with everything else. These other things, like with the ADT one, it only works with certain, I think, Yale locks. So it won't work the level lock for the trusted neighbor thing. I'm like, is it worth it then? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know all the answers. So I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on this as well. And I'll definitely revisit both these topics, the upgrading to Matter and Matter Devices and the

the security system. So share your thoughts and all the places that you guys usually do. You can find me on Twitter at Andrew underscore OSU. You can also find me over on blue sky. If you want, you can leave a comment on the video version of this podcast. You can find the video version. If you want to watch it at youtube.com slash home kit insider. Otherwise do what you guys do best. Leave this podcast five, 10, 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice and tune in next time. I'll see you guys next week.