Now that Marc Newson is one of Apple’s design bigwigs, the guys at Curved Labs wondered what sort of new products might result from the collaboration.
Their concept? An updated AirPort WiFi router that is also a smart smoke and CO2 detector, a la Nest Protect.
Leaving aside the fact that you’d either need to have a CAT-5 Ethernet cable snaking up from your modem to your ceiling, or extensively rewire your house, we sort of love it. Router’s are necessary in today’s homes, but they pretty much just sit there once set up, just like smoke and CO2 alarms. This is a great way to converge two different devices, and it looks smarter than the gross beige and yellow boxes we hang from our ceiling anyway.
Curved’s design is a little overdone — neither Newson nor Apple would ever release an object with a display this busy, and it’s not clear to me why a thermostat needs to have a built-in display anyway — but this is a smart home product I’d actually buy. What about you?
Source: Curved.de
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “What if Apple’s next router was also a smoke alarm?”
CO2 alarm? Carbon dioxide?
What else CO2 should mean?
I think he’s pointing out that there is no point in a CO2 alarm… CO2 is everywhere and we breath large amounts of it everyday. I think the author meant a CO (or Carbon monoxide) alarm.
Only reason for a CO2 alarm is for detecting oxygen deprivation.
Just don’t put it in the bathroom. It’ll go off constantly as there’s very little oxygen in an enclosed room.
For this to work as a smoke detector, you’d have to mount it high on a wall or on the ceiling. Overreach, IMHO. I already have a couple of NEST products that do all this. It’s out of place in a router.
Biggest problem with a router in the ceiling is your cable company. Whenever something goes wrong on their end, what’s the first thing they ask you to do – power cycle the router. I cannot imagine climbing up, reaching for the router on the ceiling, pulling a power cable (because there is now power switch on any router that I know of) waiting 60 seconds and then reversing the process. Oh well…
Most likely it is a CO alarm. And at the bottom he calls it a thermostat… so there you go.