Smart Home
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Leaked Photos Show LG’s Apple Home Cameras. Code in iOS 27.2 Names Schneider Electric Too.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smart Home, Rumors,
Two leakers moved the Apple and LG home story along today, and Apple had nothing to do with it. Mark Gurman reported yesterday that Apple co-developed a line of home accessories with LG that will ship under LG's name. Today an X account called @ringo_tech posted images of four of them, and the leaker pdfu found code in iOS 27.2 that labels two Schneider Electric products the same way Apple's code labels the LG gear.
The photos will get the attention. The Schneider line in the code is the part I keep rereading. "Second-party" is Apple's own label inside its HomeKit database, and right now only the LG accessories and those two Schneider products carry it. The label reportedly means those accessories get special treatment from the operating system, which would put them in a tier between Apple's own hardware and the HomeKit gear anyone can build.
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Apple’s Smart Home Push Reportedly Comes With LG’s Name on the Box
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smart Home, Rumors,
Apple's smart home plan is reportedly bigger than one hub, and a good chunk of it says LG on the box. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple worked with LG on a set of home accessories (a video doorbell, a deadbolt lock, a thermostat, indoor and outdoor cameras and a floodlight cam) that LG will sell under its own brand. The trail runs through LG's own regulatory paperwork, filed with the FCC and UL Solutions. Apple has confirmed none of it.
Seven accessories at once is a catalog. Apple spends years on one hub while a partner fills in the liability-heavy parts of a smart home: the thing bolted to your front door, the camera on your porch, the box wired into your furnace. If you have been waiting for Apple to care about your house beyond a speaker and a TV stick, this is roughly what that would look like.
Click to continue reading Apple’s Smart Home Push Reportedly Comes With LG’s Name on the Box
Samsung Pushed a Test Build to Korean Fridges Two Days Before Chuseok
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Your refrigerator does not have a reboot ritual. You don't sit down with a coffee and watch a progress bar crawl across the door panel. It runs for a decade, and the only time you think about it is when the ice maker jams. On the afternoon of September 22, a batch of Samsung owners in South Korea found out that deal had quietly changed.
Samsung has confirmed that a test version of a refrigerator software update went out through SmartThings by mistake instead of the finished release. Units froze partway through. The panel sat on an update message and then went dark. Interior lights stayed off, the door's auto-open feature stopped responding, the SmartThings app listed the fridge as offline, and unplugging it and plugging it back in did nothing. What it stopped doing, above all, was refrigerate.
Click to continue reading Samsung Pushed a Test Build to Korean Fridges Two Days Before Chuseok
9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Videos,
You don't notice how much friction lives in your house until someone points it out. You dig for keys every time you get home. You cross the room for a light switch that's always on the wrong wall. Your blinds offer blinding sun or total darkness and nothing in between. None of it feels broken, because that's how houses have always worked. I've been deleting that friction one piece at a time, and these are the nine upgrades that did it, from a $40 smart plug to one that costs a lot more than I'd like to admit.
Click to continue reading 9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)
Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Anker has built a smart home hub whose main selling point is that your footage never leaves your house. MindBase, announced at IFA in Berlin on September 3, is the company's first AI home hub, and it holds up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household data and family photos. No monthly fee to keep last Tuesday's doorbell clip, and no data center in Virginia sitting on video of your kitchen.
That runs against how the smart home has worked for most of the last decade, and it was the most interesting thing in a lineup of roughly 22 Anker products at the show. It's also the claim worth checking hardest, because Anker is the company that already made this exact promise once and broke it.
Click to continue reading Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud
Ugreen Built a Smart Home That Skips the Cloud. The Big One Costs $19,999
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Your security cameras are almost certainly shipping video to somebody else's server right now, and you are probably paying a monthly fee for the privilege. Ugreen showed up at IFA in Berlin with a lineup built on the opposite idea. The box sits in your house, the footage stays on it, and the AI that reads that footage runs on the same machine, with no subscription attached.
There are three of them, and the spread is enormous. The HomeAgent HA100 lists at $1,799, the HA100 Pro at $5,999, and the MasterAgent MA100 at $19,999. Early backers pay roughly half. Nothing ships until late January 2027 at the earliest, and the MA100 not until July of that year.
Click to continue reading Ugreen Built a Smart Home That Skips the Cloud. The Big One Costs $19,999
Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home,
Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.
Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.
Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Dyson spent six years building a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth. The CameraJet is up for pre-order now at $499.99 in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, and it ships September 8. It brushes, flosses and rinses in one pass. The seeing part is the whole pitch. A camera under the brush head finds the gaps between your teeth and fires water at them, so you never have to aim.
That is either the most Dyson product ever made or five hundred dollars for a toothbrush. Both are true.
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The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Smart Home,
When it comes to home entertainment, most people think they need a bigger TV to get a more immersive experience. But you don't need to drop thousands on a massive new panel. True immersion is less about the screen itself and more about the space around it.
The Govee TV Backlight 3 tackles exactly this. It bleeds your content onto the wall behind your TV. This expands your viewing area beyond the bezels in a way that is incredibly eye-catching.
What is in the box
Govee ships everything you need in one package. You get the LED strip, a camera bar to monitor the picture, a control box, corner clips to keep things stable, orange calibration squares, and a power adapter.
You have two sizing options depending on your setup. The 11.8-foot version covers 55 to 65-inch screens. The larger 16.4-foot version fits 75 to 85-inch TVs.
Click to continue reading The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make
The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
The Amazon Echo Dot cost $49.99 last week. It costs $79.99 now, a 60 percent jump that Amazon made overnight with no announcement. Fortune caught the change across Amazon's hardware lineup and got the company to confirm it.
Amazon's explanation is the one every hardware maker is giving this year. A spokeswoman said the consumer electronics industry is facing steep increases in memory and storage component costs, and that Amazon absorbed them for as long as it could before adjusting prices across its product lines.
Click to continue reading The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason