Tim Cook is living the Jetsons lifestyle — minus the jetpack and flying car — thanks to Siri and the growing number of HomeKit devices on the market.
The Apple CEO offered a rare glimpse into his private life Tuesday during Apple’s quarterly financial report, painting a picture of techno-utopian comfort and ease. It was Cook’s most personal world-beating earnings call ever, and it sent a message: Apple is serious about home automation.
Turning your dumb old house into a Jetsons-style smart home of the future just got a little bit easier, with Elgato’s introduction of a super-cheap motion sensor.
The HomeKit-connected device, called Eve Motion, lets users pair it with other smart appliances and gadgets to automate workflows. You can then use Eve Motion to trigger a series of tasks, like turning on the lights when it detects that you walk into a room.
Former Apple exec Michael Barnick is selling his $35 million California mansion, and all we can say is … wow!
Not only is the home the epitome of iPod minimalist modernism, but it’s (perhaps unsurprisingly) pretty high-tech, too. Controllable entirely via iPhone or iPad, the list of automated features includes lighting, music, TV, air conditioning, window blinds, fireplaces and door locks — with Barnick himself designing the home-automation setup.
Check out some of the gorgeous pictures below.
Electrics giant Westinghouse is getting into the connected-home game, and its first offering is a smart lock that looks like it should be seeing if it can’t lock down a stabilizer in a Star Wars X-Wing.
The Nucli (which is pronounced “new-klee” and not “nuck-lee,” regardless of how your brain sees it) will offer a wealth of features to help you secure your domain.
Home automation, specifically Apple’s HomeKit framework and its compatible accessories, is the latest Thing We’re Supposed to Get Excited About™. And it has a lot of promise for convenience, time-saving, and just generally feeling like you live in the future.
The first HomeKit-compatible smartplug is upon us, courtesy of iHome. The ISP5 SmartPlug is a $40 device that plugs into your wall outlet and lets you run whatever you plug into it from your iPhone, using either Siri or the companion app.
It does everything it says it will: You can set up rooms and zones, and control individual appliances or whole groups of them with a tap or quick voice command. It also lets you build “rules” to make your stuff turn on and off without your input. All of this is cool, but when you actually have one, you might struggle to think of useful ways to use it.
Hidden in HomeKit documentation published today is the intriguing confirmation that Apple TV will serve as the digital hub for Apple’s new home-automation setup.
It’s a reminder of just how seriously Apple now treats the set-top box that it dismissed as a “hobby” a few years ago.
Ever since Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch last September, it’s been one disappointment after another as far as I’m concerned. Apple’s first wearable won’t come in the minimalist form factor of the fitness bracelets I love. Worse yet, the launch version of the fashion-forward device will lack GPS, suffer from underwhelming battery life and fail to offer truly native third-party apps.
For the first time, I realized I would not be buying an Apple product when it first hit the market. “It’s not worth lining up for,” I told my dad when he asked what I thought after the Apple Watch’s big reveal.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Apple Watch’s launch day, which is coming sometime this spring. And I’m not talking about the previously unthinkable — an Apple fan calling the Microsoft Band the best smartwatch on the planet. No, I’m talking about wading through an ungodly sea of really bad smartwatches at International CES earlier this month and seeing indisputable proof of just how innovative and disruptive Apple Watch actually will be.
The year is 2018. After a long day at work, you pull into your driveway, whip out your iPhone 10 Plus and say, “Siri, I’m home.”
Your garage door opens silently, beckoning you to enter the ultra-connected smart home of the future.
As you walk in, your lights turn on. The wife used to get on you about leaving the lights on, but her nagging feels like a distant memory now. Your thermostat cools everything down to a comfortable 69 degrees. Knowing that you pulled into the driveway two minutes ago, your oven has started preheating itself. You usually fix dinner for yourself on Thursdays, so it’s time for frozen pizza.
LAS VEGAS — iDevices’ first HomeKit-compatible product will be a simple on-off switch that turns your iPhone into a remote control for lamps and appliances.
It’s name is simple too: Switch.
The $49.99 rectangular device plugs into an outlet. You plug a standard electrical device like a lamp or stereo into its convenient side outlet, and then you can turn that device on and off remotely. Switch comes in plain white, although a colored band of lights can be programmed to glow in custom colors to brighten up a dark hallway.
“You can change it to any color you like,” said Dan Cepa, iDevices’ senior director of sales, during CES International.
Nest has acquired Revolv, the Colarado-based startup which allowed users to control their smart home devices from a single interface using their smartphone.
No price has yet been announced for the purchase, which follows Nest’s $555 million Dropcam purchase back in June, and Nest’s own acquisition by Google for a massive $3.2 billion earlier this year.
