Wait. Let me guess. It’s about 600 dollars overpriced, requires proprietary wiring, is not repairable (because Tim Cook believes you are leasing it from apple), requires an Internet connection to perform a basic function that has worked for over 100 years without AI, oh and it doesn’t have an actual button to reduce waste. You are supposed to use your old one or buy an apple button for another 600 dollars. Also, it stops working or slows down after a year and for some reason you need a subscription to use it.
Don’t forget the pro wall mount is $599
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
It’s the lowest entry point into smart homes.
Only if you put it outside the basement door
DaaaAaaD!!
I dont have a smart doorbell because I cant decide which to get. I am screwed by indecision if this is the lowest barrier for entry.
I don’t want anything that records to the cloud, because then I don’t control the footage. And pretty much all of them do that now…
The ones that support HomeKit do record to the cloud, but it’s at least encrypted. There’s failure points, so it’s not a fool-proof system, but it’s considerably better system than most cloud camera systems that will joyfully hand over your videos to the police without a warrant or store it in some S3 bucket that doesn’t even have user level access controls.
In that it will appeal most to the people at the lowest end of the IQ range?
