HomeKit - page 9

This week, on The CultCast: rumors point to a big iPhone 8 price hike. What’s the max you would pay? Plus: Intel makes a huge move to push Thunderbolt into the mainstream; Ikea about to drop tons of great HomeKit gadgets on us; DJI’s Spark selfie drone is a compact powerhouse; we’ll tell you about our favorite smart lights; and we’ll tell you about the weird and whacky gadgets we’re reviewing in an all-new Under Review!

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Logitech’s neat little Pop buttons, which bring simple controls to your smart home devices, now work with Apple HomeKit.

The latest Pop kit, available exclusively from the Apple store and Apple.com, comes with the bridge device you’ll need to integrate Pop buttons into your network.

Apple is continuing to broaden the number of HomeKit-compatible devices available it sells, with D-Link’s new smart home security camera system now available through its online store.

The $199.95 Omna 180 Cam HD boasts a 1080p night vision camera, with two-way audio and 180-degree field of view, capable of sending video notifications to your iPhone or iPad whenever motion is detected.

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.

The jury’s still out on whether HomeKit will really take over our homes and all the smart devices in them, but new HomeKit-compatible devices continue to pop up all the time. At CES 2017 in Las Vegas this week, vendors showed off a bunch of them, from light switches to security cameras.

Here’s our roundup of the best.

Accessory maker Elgato unveiled its new Thunderbolt 3 Dock at CES, offering a way for users to connect a pair of 4K displays to their new MacBook Pro, in addition to plenty of other legacy connection options.

Costing $299, it promises to stand in for the plethora of dongles you’ll need as the tech world makes the jump to Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C.

Apple’s HomeKit platform is set to power an entire community currently under construction in San Jose.

Real estate development firm KB Home revealed today that its new community, Promenade at Communications Hill, will be the first ever in the US to have HomeKit technology built-in, providing a seamless experience from the foundation up.

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.

In an effort to beat rivals like Google into people’s homes, Apple is reportedly working with building firms to incorporate HomeKit-compatible technologies into houses as they’re being built.

“We want to bring home automation to the mainstream,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, told Bloomberg. “The best place to start is at the beginning, when a house is just being created.”

The iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch are getting all the attention today with the public releases of iOS 10 and watchOS 3, but the Apple TV also just got a ton of new features thanks to the official release of tvOS 10.

Apple gave hackers an inside look at how it keeps iOS 10 secure during a recent Black Hat conference keynote that has now been made available to view online. 

The keynote by Apple security expert Ivan Krstic discusses three iOS security mechanisms (HomeKit, Auto Unlock and iCloud Keychain) in unprecedented detail, showing key elements of Apple’s cryptographic design. If you’ve ever been curious how Apple keeps all your private data safe, it’s well worth watching. 

Check it out below:

This post is brought to you by Elgato, makers of Eve Energy.

We’ve been told for a long time to expect the Internet of Things to give us a new relationship with our homes. By releasing HomeKit, Apple took a big step toward turning that prediction into reality, offering a platform for apps to interact with your home right through your iPhone.

Are you a third-party dev, advertiser, or Apple employee hoping to use targeted ads or personalized recommenders based on Apple customer data? There’s an app for that. Good luck with that!

That’s according to a new report, which states that Apple has an internal committee consisting of three expert “privacy czars,” who have have to sign off on any and all collection of Apple user data.

And if you thought the App Store review process could drag on, you’ve got another thing coming: debates over individual uses of data at Apple can, in some cases, continue for upwards of one year.

Best List: Eve Weather by Elgato

Sure, I can check the weather using any number of built-in or third-party apps on my iPhone, but what if I want to know what the humidity is in my own backyard?

Weather nerds rejoice — we now have a way to access and track the weather from anywhere this simple, easy to use white box and associated app is placed. The Eve Weather outdoor weather sensor melds right in with Elgato’s other HomeKit-compatible products, too, letting me check the details of my local microclimate with ease.

I can also ask Siri what the temperature is in the backyard, which is all kinds of cool.

Best List: Eve Energy Switch and Power Meter by Elgato

Thanks to this cool little HomeKit gadget from Elgato, I know exactly how much energy my PlayStation 4 uses (79 watts). I also know how much energy is sucked away by my living room lamp (40 watts), my big HDTV (143 watts) and my Apple TV (8 watts).

All I did was plug each of these devices into Elgato’s new Eve Energy Switch and Power Meter, and then pull up the associated app on my iPhone to get instant information on the power being pulled through whatever I’ve plugged in.

The smartplug is also voice-activated, letting me turn on and off whatever device is attached to it.

Neat, huh?

Gadget maker Elgato has been churning out HomeKit-compatible devices like crazy, and it’s just dropped another that takes the smartplug concept one further.

Eve Energy became available for sale in the U.S. today after a European launch. It plugs into your wall, and then a device of your choice plugs into it. You’ll be able to turn the thing off and on with your phone either through Elgato’s app or with Siri, and plenty of things on the market already do that. But Energy will also tell you how much power the thing plugged into it uses, which adds a new layer of functionality to the gadget.

This week on The CultCast: super-sized drones, app-controlled robot bartenders, smart coffee mugs and the coolest of gadgets from CES 2016. Plus, don’t miss our picks for the absolutely, positively, you-should-install-them-today, most essential Mac and iOS apps.

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We like HomeKit; don’t get us wrong. Apple’s automation framework has taken our relationship with our lights to strange, wonderful, and not at all awkward new places. And we like the potential of saving money on energy with smart thermostats, getting smoke and carbon monoxide alarms directly on our phones, and using our iPhone or Apple Watch like a virtual bouncer to control who gets into our homes.

That’s the problem, though — that’s basically all anyone’s done with HomeKit. And it’s mostly lights and plugs.

But First Alert has arrived to bust us out of this rut with a promising device that sounds both useful and eminently futuristic: a HomeKit-compatible safe. And if that doesn’t fill you with dreams and vision for what automation can mean, we’re sure you’ll enjoy your bulbs. We really do.

iDevices is doing a better job at pushing HomeKit than Apple is.

That’s the impression we’re getting, anyway, as the peripheral maker just keeps churning out products that are compatible with the home-automation framework built into your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

The four new devices, which the company is showing off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, bring its total number of things digital assistant Siri can control up to seven.

If you’re even slightly interested in having smart lighting for your house, the new Philips Hue bridge, which supports Apple’s HomeKit automated-home framework, should be in your shopping cart right now.

Controlling your lights from your phone is one level of crazy future-stuff, but doing it with your voice drops you into an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And you definitely want your home to feel like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

You should be excited to get Siri up and running with your new Philips Hue bridge and control your lights with the power of your voice, but one annoying error might stop you. It definitely had me scouring the Internet for answers when I was setting up my smartbulb system this afternoon, and I’d love to save you that time.

Because if you’ve spent $200 on fancy lightbulbs, you probably want to start using them right away, damn it.

Apple’s list of HomeKit-compatible devices is finally starting to look impressive.

The company’s smarthome framework has been off to a bit of a slow start since Apple first unveiled it at its Worldwide Developers Conference last year, but this fall might be when it actually hits its stride. The list of available compatible devices is growing, according to an update on Apple’s website.

The last universal remote we bought cost $20 from Walgreens. It was a big, ugly hunk of plastic, but it controlled the TV and VCR just fine.

These days, things have gotten a little more complicated. Now we have an HDTV, three set-top boxes, two game consoles and Sonos, as well a Nest thermostat and a bunch of Bluetooth-connected lightbulbs.

Logitech’s new Harmony Elite is a universal remote that controls all these devices and more. It’s price is listed at an eye-popping $350, but this is much more than a TV remote. It’s a smarthome hub for just about every connected device in your house, designed to give HomeKit and Siri a run for their money.

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.