Our rickety old home in San Francisco is stubbornly dumb.
Yeah, we have some smart lightbulbs scattered around, but my wife hates them. Their atmospheric mood lighting gets on her nerves. She made me set them to bright white light like regular bulbs.
We turned off our “smart” Nest thermostat because its learning feature went haywire. It ran the heating all night while we were in bed and turned it off during the day when it was freezing cold.
We had a smart lock for a while, but it was so unreliable we replaced it.
Our internet-connected irrigation timer is worthless. It’s supposed to pause watering when it rains and increase it when the sun’s out. Of course, it’s completely unreliable and killed half our plants when we went on vacation.
We do own some smart plugs that, so far, work pretty well. They’re great for tracking power usage, but aside from timing some Christmas lights, we haven’t really put them to use.
I guess I’d like motorized shades that open automatically in the morning and door locks that secure the house at bedtime, but life’s too short to be messing with this stuff if it’s flaky. I deal with tech headaches all day. I don’t want to spend my evenings doing the same.
So I’m pretty excited and optimistic about Apple’s long-rumored home hub, which looks like it’ll finally launch in just a couple of weeks.
If any company can straighten out the horrible mess of the smart home market, it’s Apple. Yeah, industry standards like Matter, which lets disparate products work together, help. But Apple’s ease-of-use savvy and giant market power are sure to bring order to the chaos. I don’t know if my wife will be on board, though.
Here’s everything that’s leaked so far about Apple’s smart home hub. It really does sound pretty cool.
Also in today’s newsletter:
LOL. The new AirPods Pro 5 have finally ditched their notoriously poor 0-out-of-10 repairability score. They are now “the least unrepairable AirPods yet.”
Apple’s Creator Studio bundle just added a big batch of new features.
🔥 DEAL OF THE DAY: This fantastic-looking rechargeable soldering iron from Fanttik is down to just $52. #affiliate
Steve Jobs was right when he said back in 2002 that iSync, Apple’s first attempt at cloud-based data synchronization, was “the beginning of something really big.”
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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