Yes! Irrigation control is on my list too. There are several interesting looking products in that market right now.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iHome's iSP5 SmartPlug Is Far From Perfect, But It's a Cheap Way to Give HomeKit a Try
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Agreed. Ideally, you want a new build. Then you can have every switch, socket, etc on a wired connection to the hub, which does all the ON/OFFing with the hub being the only wifi connected device in the house.
But for those of us with already built homes...
May I suggest smarthome.com for browsing? Most of those things are there for your perusal.
Yes, it is mostly commodity hardware wrapped in some fairly pedestrian plastic housings, but I don't think iHome is being obtuse by pricing it at $40.
First, you have to ask: are they ready to ramp up production to the levels needed to make this ubiquitous tech? That kind of capacity has its own cost savings - buying in bulk - but also much larger initial costs. High-priced goods often indicate a company not completely convinced that people will want what it is selling.
Second, are they ready for prime time? Ticking off a handful of early adopters is often better for a brand than doing the same to a large body of mass-market consumers. Yeah, you spent $5 on the thing that stopped working after a few months, or never quite worked "right" in the first place, but that was your $5, etc. Pricing it at $40 keeps the PR damage from a failure much smaller rather than "tricking" people into being your beta testers.
Third, is there even a large market for this? Let's assume the components here cot $5 per outlet. Yeah, at $10/outlet you could do a lot of business here, but will it be 10x what you do at $40/outlet (as it would need to be to counter the above negatives ... $50 profit versus $35)? Is the market really that big? I mean, we are talking about "dumb" appliance control only - floor lamps with just on/off physical switches, non-electronically-controlled fans, etc.
IMHO, the $40 should deter a lot of people from buying in right now. But that's because the technology isn't baked enough yet to support commodity pricing.
That rating is misleading because it's for both the non-HomeKit version of the thermostat as well as the HomeKit version. I just read several of the reviews and all five of them that I read explicitly stated that either the review was for the non-HomeKit version of the thermostat or that they had not used the HomeKit integration yet. Therefore, I don't think you can conclude that HomeKit works well based on the positive reviews this product has.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
With all of the Wifi devices being proposed, I think I need to move to a class B network.
I am assuming these dont protect against a surge hun?
Can you control individual things with the app open rather than using siri? I could use this to open my garage? My wifi connects all around my yard so that would be very cool
Can you control individual things with the app open rather than using siri? I could use this to open my garage? My wifi connects all around my yard so that would be very cool
No, you need the physical switch to remain in the "on" position, always. If you want to turn it off manually, find the iHome plug attached to the wall, and press the little toggle button on the top-right (behind the little green light). Then, yes, "Siri" will know that the light is turned off.
Doing it your way (turning the lamp off at its built-in switch) will just make the lamp not respond to the iHome controller until you toggle the built-in switch again. This is two switches in series. They both have to be "on" for the light to get power; if either (or both) is off then the light is off. You are thinking of it as something like a "three-way" wall switch (when you have light switches on both ends of a hallway so that toggling either will toggle the light between on and off), which would be awesome but electrical outlets don't have the third powered prong which would be required to allow such fanciness (there is a third prong but it is for ground fault). So, that won't ever happen.
This is the fundamental issue with trying to retrofit home control into legacy "dumb" devices. You won't see the really nice benefits until the devices themselves are smart enough to understand home control.
I see what you're saying but just search the reviews for "homekit" to filter them out. Then show critical reviews - there are 4 (one of those is from someone who felt like they were duped because they bought the non-Homekit version - that leaves 3). Then show positive reviews - there are 49.
Also, I personally own the product so I can conclude mine works great.
Last edited:
Jett answered your question perfectly. I wanted to add that is why Hue Tap was such a must have accessories. It makes it so you can actually have a traditional light switch on your wall (or use it as a remote). You do not want to always have to pull your phone out or use your voice to turn lights on/off.
It depends. Each can use an app to control things. You can also get keypads that do the same, just like a regular switch. There are other choices as well.
I think there is a valid need and a potential market for good home automation products. However, I find myself (again) disappointed with Apple's approach to a new product ... this one being HomeKit. With past Apple leadership I would have expected Apple to have one (and only one) iOS app that would be used to set up and control all HomeKit-enabled automation devices. But now - UGH! - it appears that users who would like to use multiple home automation solutions from different manufacturers will have to deal with a plethora of different apps and set up methods and - yes - a plethora of bugs and other issues. Apple seems to have lost their way, and their products are becoming less and less user friendly and less "simple." Come on Apple! You can do better than this!!
I tried to install a WeMo switch at a second home and it wouldnt work. I was told i could only control devices on a single network. Thats not the case with the dLink switches i bought instead.
Right?
There really is two kinds of home automation. The first is the hard wired, installed and programmed by a pro when your house was built. This market has been around for decades and is quite mature. I've never seen one, but have read about them. Bill gates gives visitors a badge like the visitors passes you see on TV. It turns on light for them, etc. Apparently he'd program it to adjust the temperature for the room you were in based on your personal preferences. Light switches, I would think, would be a simple toggle that when touched/pressed, would act like the power button on your tv. You can off your tv by hitting the button on the tv, but still turn it on later via the remote.
He second is the DIY install that products like this are trying to satisfy. This is a relatively new thing, that obviously has a long way to go. Better would be to have the thing plugged in (say a lamp) be connected itself with a TV style switch so you could turn it on/off either at the lamp or via you phone. Better than the HUE bulb would be a connected wall switch with, again, a TV type on/off button. I think we will see massive improvement over the next half decade. It's all just not ready for prime time. Yet.
I get that it's been around for a long time, but I want it to be smarter than using motion sensors. I want my home to know when all smartphones have left the building, so it's good to turn off all lights in the house and turn up the thermostat a bit. I want it to know that I'm 12 hours from home by reporting my GPS location, so it's okay to go ahead and turn the thermostat off completely and even turn off the water. There are TONS of examples I can come up with. Iris from Lowe's does this to an extent, but it's expensive and buggy (I'm a beta tester).
Mine already does all that as well, based on GPS. Same for door locks. Same for Thermostat, which is a Nest.
Last edited:
The DIY approach has been around since the late 70s or so. There are few limits of what you can do with current tech in all those areas. The lights in my place have been on automatic for 30+ years using OTS products.
From Wiki: " In 1978, X10 products started to appear in Radio Shack and Sears stores. Together with BSR a partnership was formed, with the name X10 Ltd. At that time the system consisted of a 16 channel command console, a lamp module, and an appliance module. Soon after came the wall switch module and the first X10 timer."
Another thing that people need to realize about home automation is that replacing switches or even re-wiring your entire house doesn't actually give you an automated home. There is a lot of logic that needs to be created that is, by necessity, highly customized.
A lot of the value of a system like Control4 is that they program and maintain it for you. If you're not comfortable around bare electrical wires AND computer code-style logical structures, the DIY market is not for you at this point. People pay a lot of money for proprietary systems because those companies do all the heavy lifting for you. You tell them what you want, and they give it to you, for a price.
The problem with mass-market appeal for home automation is that not many people are comfortable doing it themselves, and it's not affordable otherwise if you're not in the upper income brackets. A couple of things could change that. The more likely, IMO, will be that at some point energy management gets mandated in the electrical codes. All new construction and major renovations will be required to install HVAC and electrical systems that can interact with a demand-response system to some extent.
The other would be if someone managed to come up with a control system for home automation that did what the Nest does for HVAC control: watches you for some period of time while you "train" it, then it's able to refine it's automation capabilities by keeping tabs on you. But the complexity of such a product to cover enough use-cases to appeal broadly is very high. If the Nest messes up and declares you AWAY when you're actually not, you might get hot or cold before you can fix it. If your house decides you're AWAY when you're not, it is way more disruptive, and has safety implications if things go dark at the wrong time. But such a control hub would remove the technical side of things. It's much cheaper to pay an electrician to change out some switches once than it is to pay a control company a monthly service fee.
I spend way more time tweaking and testing the code portions of my system than I do installing devices.
A lot of the value of a system like Control4 is that they program and maintain it for you. If you're not comfortable around bare electrical wires AND computer code-style logical structures, the DIY market is not for you at this point. People pay a lot of money for proprietary systems because those companies do all the heavy lifting for you. You tell them what you want, and they give it to you, for a price.
The problem with mass-market appeal for home automation is that not many people are comfortable doing it themselves, and it's not affordable otherwise if you're not in the upper income brackets. A couple of things could change that. The more likely, IMO, will be that at some point energy management gets mandated in the electrical codes. All new construction and major renovations will be required to install HVAC and electrical systems that can interact with a demand-response system to some extent.
The other would be if someone managed to come up with a control system for home automation that did what the Nest does for HVAC control: watches you for some period of time while you "train" it, then it's able to refine it's automation capabilities by keeping tabs on you. But the complexity of such a product to cover enough use-cases to appeal broadly is very high. If the Nest messes up and declares you AWAY when you're actually not, you might get hot or cold before you can fix it. If your house decides you're AWAY when you're not, it is way more disruptive, and has safety implications if things go dark at the wrong time. But such a control hub would remove the technical side of things. It's much cheaper to pay an electrician to change out some switches once than it is to pay a control company a monthly service fee.
I spend way more time tweaking and testing the code portions of my system than I do installing devices.
There will be plenty of these gadgets available at yard sales next Spring for pennies on the dollar.
Doubt it. These kind of things have been around for many years, always in the 20-50 range. I don't see that changing all that rapidly. I think we might see 10-20 range in a year or so.
