There’s been a lot of reporting in recent months around Apple’s efforts to expand its footprint in customers’ homes with in-development products like a
How long have people been trying to make smart homes a thing? I feel like this would have happened by now if there was a real mass market for them. It’s not like there is a huge technological impediment to achieving that vision, like there is for VR/AR. In other ways it’s just like VR, a cool idea that’s been around forever, but doesn’t seem to have widespread application or demand.
If apple is really working on this, I consider it further evidence that they are really really struggling to have a substantive vision of the future. Other than incremental improvement of existing products and financially beneficial business maneuvers, what have they done in the last decade other than try to grasp at old sci-fi notions of ‘the future’. I suspect that this can’t change until they get new leadership. Of course, they’ve largely achieved escape velocity in terms of revenue, and are so established now that the money machine will keep working for a long time, independent of any need to be actually visionary.
The home automation field is potentially going through a revolution with the new Matter/Thread standard, that Apple helped define. Devices are much more likely to work together and they should not be calling home. Apple already has the Apple TV and whatever the speaker is that can act as automation hubs, and HomeKit software across their product line to provide nice dashboards, shared across your family, integrate with local Siri, etc.
I took a very cursory look at HomeKit a while ago and found its ability to create complex automations rather limited. For example, our washer & dryer are in our basement, and we can easily forget we have loads of laundry being washed/dryed when we get busy with the rest of our days.
We now have an automation that will text me and/or my wife when a laundry cycle finishes. But it only alerts us if we’re home, and only whoever is home so can go take care of it. If nobody is home when the cycle completes then it waits until one or both of us is home, and then it alerts us. It also won’t alert us overnight but will wait until morning. So if we start a load of laundry at 10pm it doesn’t wake us up at midnight but instead waits until 7am to alert us.
I’ve implemented this in both Home Assistant and Indigo without too much difficulty. Not sure how easy it would be to do in HomeKit though…
That’s one of the more complex automations I’ve created, but I have a few others that are up there as well.
But how does it handle issues like retrying until one and/or the other person is alerted, without erroneously alerting the other at a later time when they get home? And pausing until the next morning and picking up where it left off?
The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.
And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.
Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.
It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.
I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.
That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.
With the new Matter/Thread standard, we may finally have a unified market where everything works together, and Apple is one of the sponsors of that. With Apple, Amazon and Google all supporting it and adding it to their devices, there’s too huge an already established base to ignore. Of course it’s rolling out frustratingly slowly, but something like this could be the sark that ignites it
Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.
I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.
I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.
One of the reasons the rollout has gone so slowly is device profiles. Imagine a committee of every company that makes or wants to make a certain type of device, having to come to a consensus about supported functionality. Sounds like a nightmare, sounds like things will get stuck for years (and they have) …. But now we’ve had several releases of device profiles defining how most basic device types should act.
When I read about this, I became much more optimistic about Matter/Thread. This is a big deal and I don’t know why there aren’t more articles about it
No, the biggest problem with smart homes is that honestly, a switch on the wall that always works, even when you don’t have your phone on you and even in the dark when you are half asleep is a pretty optimal interface for things like lights.
The problem with the idea of smart light switches is that they are only useful if you aren’t already in the room and turning on your light when you aren’t there is a pretty niche use case.
The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there’s one switch for the lights and it’s in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you’d enter the living room from the rest of the house.
The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.
Though, and this is the next use case, I really don’t have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that’ll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there’s a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you’ll find in use in that you don’t have to actually be moving, because it’s good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)
And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it’s also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don’t resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it’ll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)
Also it’s useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.
So yeah, it’s maybe not life-changing by itself, but it’s seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I’ve got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I’m doing in the room.
Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It’s not trivial, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a product most people could build on their own, so I don’t entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.
You are one of those people who doesn’t get that that is absolutely not appealing to 95% of the population. It might be a fun tinkering project and if you enjoy that more power to you but what those 95% of people would do is at most move that light switch to a more convenient part of the room. I am a big fan of automating things in general in the context of my PC and it is not even appealing to me (mainly because hardware projects do not appeal to me and I don’t like to open my home up to security issues), so you are talking about an appeal to a small part even of the geekier part of the population.
For me, one of my principles is that smart home stuff should work normally , with automation as a bonus. That means smart switches, not bulbs, and generally means no subscriptions or internet dependencies.
Some use cases for my smart switches are:
automatic timers for multiple rooms to make the house appear lived in, or to match my schedule
voice response, in case my hands are full r I don’t want to get up
easier dimming - I can say “set dining room light 20%” faster than I can get up, walk over, and futz with the switch
scenes, such as work mode, to set everything just the way I like it
For example, one of my automations is
half an hour after sunset, turn on dining room light to 50%
if weekday, set to 30% at 9pm, and turn on bedroom light
if weekend, do it an hour later
turn off dining room half an hour later
turn off bedroom light half an hour later
If I’m home, this matches my schedule. If I’m not, maybe I look like I am. Maybe you think this looks needlessly complicated but it’s convenient and it’s not something you can do without smart devices
I don’t doubt apple’s ability to make this work well. I do doubt that there is more than a niche market for it. I also think it’s boring, and for some reason, I still expect apple to do better.
Well no, it’s not enormous, but Amazon is selling a couple million ring doorbells a year, and a couple million more of their cameras.
It’s a sufficiently large market to hop into, especially if you can make a product that’s easier to deal with from an ecosystem perspective than the incumbents, which isn’t something I’d ever bet against Apple managing to pull off.
Having a Ring doorbell is a game changer. If you’ve never used one I understand the reticence.
I do think it will be standard thing in the future. It’s a basic quality of life improvement having a record of door interactions, being able to answer when you are away, even answering without going to the door. It’s easy to understand and appealing to most people.
Also true. I use it in a business setting and it sort of doubles as a security camera. I would love to have the same functionality at home but it would have to be self hosted. Super creepy for a company to be watching my house
In a business setting I assume you are in a country with a low level of privacy protection since I can’t imagine storing images of everyone walking past your door would be compatible with something like the GDPR.
From my understanding it depends on the area covered. Generally it is less of a problem if you e.g. just point it at the opposite wall in front of your apartment door or something similar restrictive and much more of a problem if you point it across the street. Commercial and residential use are also treated differently and there might also be additional problems due to usage of the recordings by Amazon or excessive storage durations.
I vaguely looked into it when I bought my first home and ultimately decided that it was more trouble than it was worth. You basically either have to pay a subscription fee for some company to do all the processing for you, and they’re liable to either increase the price on you, or go bankrupt. Or you need to run your own server.
These days your home automation hub can be an Apple TV, or Amazon Echo device, or many similar, there’s really not much to bother with and many people already have it.
The new Matter/Thread standard continues to slow rollout with the promise of unifying smart devices that had been scattered across several different paradigms, and should just work together (and without the s scription r having to hope the manufacturer keeps its portal running.
Not to push but if you were considering home automation but those were blocking issues, you should look again
How long have people been trying to make smart homes a thing? I feel like this would have happened by now if there was a real mass market for them. It’s not like there is a huge technological impediment to achieving that vision, like there is for VR/AR. In other ways it’s just like VR, a cool idea that’s been around forever, but doesn’t seem to have widespread application or demand.
If apple is really working on this, I consider it further evidence that they are really really struggling to have a substantive vision of the future. Other than incremental improvement of existing products and financially beneficial business maneuvers, what have they done in the last decade other than try to grasp at old sci-fi notions of ‘the future’. I suspect that this can’t change until they get new leadership. Of course, they’ve largely achieved escape velocity in terms of revenue, and are so established now that the money machine will keep working for a long time, independent of any need to be actually visionary.
The home automation field is potentially going through a revolution with the new Matter/Thread standard, that Apple helped define. Devices are much more likely to work together and they should not be calling home. Apple already has the Apple TV and whatever the speaker is that can act as automation hubs, and HomeKit software across their product line to provide nice dashboards, shared across your family, integrate with local Siri, etc.
My HomeKit automation makes my friends who spend a ton of time researching and setting shit up look silly.
I hate saying it but my automation just works, and they’re still in the perpetual tinker stage.
I took a very cursory look at HomeKit a while ago and found its ability to create complex automations rather limited. For example, our washer & dryer are in our basement, and we can easily forget we have loads of laundry being washed/dryed when we get busy with the rest of our days.
We now have an automation that will text me and/or my wife when a laundry cycle finishes. But it only alerts us if we’re home, and only whoever is home so can go take care of it. If nobody is home when the cycle completes then it waits until one or both of us is home, and then it alerts us. It also won’t alert us overnight but will wait until morning. So if we start a load of laundry at 10pm it doesn’t wake us up at midnight but instead waits until 7am to alert us.
I’ve implemented this in both Home Assistant and Indigo without too much difficulty. Not sure how easy it would be to do in HomeKit though…
That’s one of the more complex automations I’ve created, but I have a few others that are up there as well.
Sounds like a fairly simple automation tbh.
Notifications tend to come through HomeKit itself rather than as a text message.
So they’re native push alerts to phones / people / devices enrolled in the home.
But how does it handle issues like retrying until one and/or the other person is alerted, without erroneously alerting the other at a later time when they get home? And pausing until the next morning and picking up where it left off?
I dont have this set up so idk, but I do know automations are able to be coordinated based on location and who is present and when.
These constraints aren’t anything major is all that I’m saying
The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.
And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.
Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.
It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.
I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.
That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.
The lack of cohesion and the fact that everyone who makes camera stuff is shady as shit.
With the new Matter/Thread standard, we may finally have a unified market where everything works together, and Apple is one of the sponsors of that. With Apple, Amazon and Google all supporting it and adding it to their devices, there’s too huge an already established base to ignore. Of course it’s rolling out frustratingly slowly, but something like this could be the sark that ignites it
I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards…
Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.
I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.
I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.
One of the reasons the rollout has gone so slowly is device profiles. Imagine a committee of every company that makes or wants to make a certain type of device, having to come to a consensus about supported functionality. Sounds like a nightmare, sounds like things will get stuck for years (and they have) …. But now we’ve had several releases of device profiles defining how most basic device types should act.
When I read about this, I became much more optimistic about Matter/Thread. This is a big deal and I don’t know why there aren’t more articles about it
Good to know. Thanks for the insight!
No, the biggest problem with smart homes is that honestly, a switch on the wall that always works, even when you don’t have your phone on you and even in the dark when you are half asleep is a pretty optimal interface for things like lights.
If only they made smart switches you could use, perhaps?
100% agree that smart bulbs are incredibly stupid and you should go with a switch if you want to smartify shit.
deleted by creator
The problem with the idea of smart light switches is that they are only useful if you aren’t already in the room and turning on your light when you aren’t there is a pretty niche use case.
I use them to timeout lights all the time and schedule outdoor lights.
There’s other use cases for that.
The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there’s one switch for the lights and it’s in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you’d enter the living room from the rest of the house.
The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.
Though, and this is the next use case, I really don’t have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that’ll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there’s a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you’ll find in use in that you don’t have to actually be moving, because it’s good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)
And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it’s also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don’t resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it’ll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)
Also it’s useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.
So yeah, it’s maybe not life-changing by itself, but it’s seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I’ve got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I’m doing in the room.
Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It’s not trivial, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a product most people could build on their own, so I don’t entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.
You are one of those people who doesn’t get that that is absolutely not appealing to 95% of the population. It might be a fun tinkering project and if you enjoy that more power to you but what those 95% of people would do is at most move that light switch to a more convenient part of the room. I am a big fan of automating things in general in the context of my PC and it is not even appealing to me (mainly because hardware projects do not appeal to me and I don’t like to open my home up to security issues), so you are talking about an appeal to a small part even of the geekier part of the population.
They literally said in the disclaimer lol.
For me, one of my principles is that smart home stuff should work normally , with automation as a bonus. That means smart switches, not bulbs, and generally means no subscriptions or internet dependencies.
Some use cases for my smart switches are:
For example, one of my automations is
If I’m home, this matches my schedule. If I’m not, maybe I look like I am. Maybe you think this looks needlessly complicated but it’s convenient and it’s not something you can do without smart devices
I don’t doubt apple’s ability to make this work well. I do doubt that there is more than a niche market for it. I also think it’s boring, and for some reason, I still expect apple to do better.
Well no, it’s not enormous, but Amazon is selling a couple million ring doorbells a year, and a couple million more of their cameras.
It’s a sufficiently large market to hop into, especially if you can make a product that’s easier to deal with from an ecosystem perspective than the incumbents, which isn’t something I’d ever bet against Apple managing to pull off.
Having a Ring doorbell is a game changer. If you’ve never used one I understand the reticence.
I do think it will be standard thing in the future. It’s a basic quality of life improvement having a record of door interactions, being able to answer when you are away, even answering without going to the door. It’s easy to understand and appealing to most people.
Ring is pretty Orwellian… Piping the stream from your door right to the police.
Also true. I use it in a business setting and it sort of doubles as a security camera. I would love to have the same functionality at home but it would have to be self hosted. Super creepy for a company to be watching my house
In a business setting I assume you are in a country with a low level of privacy protection since I can’t imagine storing images of everyone walking past your door would be compatible with something like the GDPR.
I’m in the USA, but I think they sell Ring and other video doorbells and security cameras in other countries, including Europe.
From my understanding it depends on the area covered. Generally it is less of a problem if you e.g. just point it at the opposite wall in front of your apartment door or something similar restrictive and much more of a problem if you point it across the street. Commercial and residential use are also treated differently and there might also be additional problems due to usage of the recordings by Amazon or excessive storage durations.
I’ve had one for a decade or so. It’s fine. Life was fine before it too. Let’s all stay grounded people.
I vaguely looked into it when I bought my first home and ultimately decided that it was more trouble than it was worth. You basically either have to pay a subscription fee for some company to do all the processing for you, and they’re liable to either increase the price on you, or go bankrupt. Or you need to run your own server.
Who can be bothered?
These days your home automation hub can be an Apple TV, or Amazon Echo device, or many similar, there’s really not much to bother with and many people already have it.
The new Matter/Thread standard continues to slow rollout with the promise of unifying smart devices that had been scattered across several different paradigms, and should just work together (and without the s scription r having to hope the manufacturer keeps its portal running.
Not to push but if you were considering home automation but those were blocking issues, you should look again