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Apple Working With Home Builders to Bolster HomeKit Adoption
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SmartThings is pretty OK, but I find the ST moving to a level of abstraction that's obnoxious. Same with the new Hue app.
The Home app in iOS 10 should be destroyed and the team disbanded. The thing is a complete piece of trash.
This is great. As more product categories have adopted Home Kit I've been adding them into my home. Soon it will seem like the dark ages when we had to manually control aspects of our home environment rather than them having intelligence to adjust themselves and respond to our presence and actions.
I have Homebridge running on an always on Mac Mini that I use at a media server. Set it up in about an hour at 2am one night when I couldn't sleep. It's been running fine since then and I have only had to restart the Mac once when I got my iPhone 7 Plus in order to get the devices to show up.
So seriously, what are some practical uses of home automation? I may have a simple life and can't imagine why I'd want to pay a lot of money to be able to use my smartphone to turn on the lights instead of walking up to the light switch and turning them on the old fashioned way.
Like, is it really cool to have the lights turn on when you get home automatically? Or you want your heating to turn off when you leave home? Or what exactly do people use this stuff for? I'm just not seeing any issues with the way things are currently in "dumb" homes (i.e. flick a switch to turn on lights, pull up the blinds by hand, lock the door with a good old fashioned key, have a thermostat monitor the heating, etc...).
Like, is it really cool to have the lights turn on when you get home automatically? Or you want your heating to turn off when you leave home? Or what exactly do people use this stuff for? I'm just not seeing any issues with the way things are currently in "dumb" homes (i.e. flick a switch to turn on lights, pull up the blinds by hand, lock the door with a good old fashioned key, have a thermostat monitor the heating, etc...).
So does that mean the "non-HomeKit" house will cost $15,000 less than the exact same house that's HomeKit enabled? Personally, I'd rather have the non-HomeKit house, save the 15k, and spend probably 5-10k to put the smart products of my choosing in the house regardless of whether or not they're compatible with HomeKit.
I don't think so.
I've got about $600 in wall switches, motion detectors, fan controllers, and dimmer outlets. None of them are "HomeKit" ... they all speak whatever their native protocol is (Insteon, zwave, etc). The only thing HomeKit is the hub that controls them. Getting an Insteon controller that supports HomeKit is like an extra $50 over the cost of an Insteon controller that doesn't support HomeKit.
I think the main cost of any smart home will be the individual switches and outlets. In most cases, those are going to be the same price regardless of your controller. So I don't see anyone saving 50% simply by choosing a controller that doesn't support HomeKit.
Personally, I don't think it's truly automation if you and your phone have to be at home before anything will happen.
For my house, I have a Insteon motion detector (that also senses when it gets dark outside). If it senses motion outside of my garage (i.e. someone in the driveway), and it's also dark outside, it will flip on the outside lights for five minutes. Convenient for getting in at night, and also helps with theft deterrence.
Most of the rest is just being lazy. My bedroom ceiling fan didn't come with a remote control. I could have bought the $50 add-on (which came with a remote control), or a $35 z-wave wall switch (that replaces the existing wall switch). I did the later, so now when I wake up at 1AM cold because I forgot to turn off the fan before I feel asleep, I can say "Hey siri, turn off my fan" instead of having to fumble for the remote control that's somewhere on the night stand.
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I pulled those figures out of the air but my point was that there will likely be a price premium for having a house outfitted with all HomeKit-compatible products. It also paints builders and buyers into a corner in terms of which products they can buy. The products they buy have to be HomeKit-compatible to maintain the same user experience, and there is a price premium for that compatibility (just like the HomeKit compatible Insteon hub costs more than the previous gen hub that is not HomeKit compatible).
There are also issues with HomeKit compatibility even when you have a HomeKit compatible hub in the house. With Insteon, for example, my understanding is that not all Insteon products/sensors are compatible with their HomeKit hub. I don't think the Insteon leak sensors will talk to the HomeKit-compatitble hub, for example. That's the only reason I haven't upgraded my Insteon hub to the HomeKit-compatible one. I'd rather know that there's a leak next to my water heater than be able to turn things on and off with Siri or the new "Home" app.
I've tried and failled to imagine very many home automation things that I'd actually want or care about.
The only thing I can think of is lighting, I guess. I don't know that I need tons of colors, but if I could have the equivalent of f.lux (or, on iOS, Night Shift) for my lighting so the color temperature comes down into the warmer end of the spectrum at night, that would be pretty cool.
Other than that, I think I have to wait until there are physical robots that can cook and clean becuase those needs are WAY higher up the chain for me than monitoring my smoke detector over the internet or whatever. Not opposed to automation, but everything that's come out so far has just seemed pretty superfluous and not solving any actual needs I have.
The only thing I can think of is lighting, I guess. I don't know that I need tons of colors, but if I could have the equivalent of f.lux (or, on iOS, Night Shift) for my lighting so the color temperature comes down into the warmer end of the spectrum at night, that would be pretty cool.
Other than that, I think I have to wait until there are physical robots that can cook and clean becuase those needs are WAY higher up the chain for me than monitoring my smoke detector over the internet or whatever. Not opposed to automation, but everything that's come out so far has just seemed pretty superfluous and not solving any actual needs I have.
Don't underestimate the power of lazy. You are correct- there's nothing wrong with the "dumb" way of doing things, but this stuff is all about making things easier (though it can be argued on some levels it's more complicated as well.) Why do we need TV remotes, automatic garage door openers, etc. I'm sure when those first came out people thought the same exact thing- now you can't even buy a TV without a remote and I can't imagine a house being built now without an automatic garage door opener.
Anyway, I initially felt the same way as you. But last year I was in the market for a new door lock and started doing some research on this smart stuff- I ended up biting the bullet and grabbed one. Now I can't imagine not having one. Being able to tell Siri to open my front door/not having to fumble with keys to open my door is amazing. Being able to check to see if other family members locked the door when they left while I'm at the office is peace of mind. Note I'm not sold on a lot of these gadgets, but I'm now looking into some smart plugs/light bulbs so I can turn on/off certain lights. When I'm lying on my couch all snugged up, the last thing I want to do is get up and walk 10 feet to turn on/off a light- yes, the power of lazy...
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Agreed. I think the main issue is for something to be certified HomeKit ready, it needs some special Apple chip- so it's not as easy as running some firmware upgrade or something for existing non-HomeKit products. And I'm sure that chip is $$$$. This is where I really think Apple blew it- yes I think their chip and the security technology behind it is way better than what the competitors currently have, but they really need to make it more enticing for the actual companies making this hardware to want to add HomeKit compatibility, which doesn't seem to be happening. And now with Amazon and Google going full force into this space, it's only going to get tougher for Apple...
Along those lines, I would be worried most about future security updates. Apple has now a history of only patching the current and possibly one previous version of MacOS(X), and only to support the current version of iOS. "Smart" HomeKit devices connected to and accessible over the internet could turn into a nightmare (literally) when remotely hacked.
That's where you're losing me.
You can have 100 devices in your house that aren't "HomeKit-compatible", but you can still use HomeKit to control every one of them if there's a hub for them that's also HomeKit-compatible.
So where does the price premium come in?
Insteon doesn't add support for their leak detectors and that's an issue with HomeKit compatibility?
From reading reviews of Insteon's HomeKit hub last year, it seemed pretty clear that that they did a craptastic job with it. I skipped it and went with the ISY994i-zw hub, which controls Insteon + zwave devices. It's not HomeKit compatible either, but someone wrote a Homebridge plugin that works great. So folks can know if there's a heater leak as well as turn things on/off via Siri/Control Center/Home app/any of the 3rd party HomeKit apps.
How much did you spend on your computer just to write that comment?
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I plan to have my own home built to my own design. So I will be choosing which smart products to buy or not. I'll also be choosing the bathtubs and the kitchen counters.
There are a few, but in my case the competition is Nest Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google). I installed Nest thermostats over three years ago and am quite pleased, but was willing to entertain a Homekit-enabled smoke detector. Sadly, the only one on the market is not ready for prime time, so I had to go with Nest Protect.
The only Homekit device I have is a power outlet attached to a hard-to-reach lamp. There really isn't anything else out there calling my name.
The Schlage deadbolt is called "Sense," not "Connect." Connect was the previous gen deadbolt without Homekit.
I bought Nest thermostats for my vacation home so that I could keep the heat at 50 when not there and still have it warmed up and ready when I arrived on a Friday evening. I now live in that home year round, and it's still good to have a smart device figuring out my heating needs, like when I'm not home, or before I wake up. Keeps my energy bill down.
Tied into that are Nest Protect smoke and CO detectors. If a fire is detected, not only will it alert me even if I'm not home, but it will also turn off the gas furnace automatically. Very clever devices.
I'm seriously looking at the August deadlock. I've been known to leave the house without my keys, but never without my iPhone and Apple Watch.
I have a bedroom lamp in an inconvenient location - that's hooked up to a Homekit-enabled outlet. This is new - I'll probably add more, like when I add the deadbolt - it would be nice to have a light come on when I walk in the house.
I'm looking forward to somebody inventing a device that will close my skylight when rain is forecast. I'm looking forward to inexpensive water detectors I can leave beside the washing machine, dishwasher, and the boiler (especially the boiler, since it's located in the attic).
Does that give you some idea?
Let's hope that HomeKit gains enough acceptance for Apple to continue to support it. Personally I am reluctant to spend extra money to buy HomeKit-compatible devices. The Home app is promising, but will not receive updates as quickly as apps in the App Store, and the reliability is too low.
I didn't know any middle class income people came to macrumors.com! LOL j/K
Apple needs to do the heavy lifting for a change and either open up the damn API so things like Belkin WEMO and Nest work with it or they need to drop their licensing. Actually they need to drop the licensing fees to make HomeKit compatible equipment either way.