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The smart home holds so much promise. It can make life more convenient with lights that turn on as you walk in a room, doors that unlock as you approach, and robots that clean your floors. It can also make your home safer, more energy efficient, and even a little more fun. (Have you tried asking Alexa to beam you up?)
But for all its benefits, the smart home can be complicated, confusing, and occasionally maddening. It’s also hard to keep up with all the changes. New gadgets are arriving daily, new features come to old products, and there are so many different ways to turn on a smart light bulb.
If you need a guide, that’s what I’m here for.
Here, I’ll be posting the latest smart home reviews, guides, news, and opinions on everything happening in the connected home. Follow this page to stay updated on what Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google, and Home Assistant and the rest are doing with their smart home platforms. I’ll keep you in the loop on all the newest technologies — including Matter, Thread, Sidewalk, UWB — as well as the old favorites. And, of course, I’ll cover all the news on the latest gadgets and the biggest releases around tech for your home.
Apple’s smart home robot could actually be a lamp.
If you were hoping its rumored home robotics foray might bring us a Rosey the Robot, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has bad news. In a post on X, he said sources indicate Apple is focused on developing a bot we’ll bond with over creating a humanoid assistant, as “...supply chain checks indicate Apple cares more about how users build perception with robots than their physical appearance.”
The good news is that means we might get that adorable lamp-droid Apple after all.
This Pixar-style dancing lamp hints at Apple’s future home robot
We’ve got more evidence that Apple is developing a tabletop robot for the home, courtesy of a blog post published on Apple’s Machine Learning Research site. First spotted by MacRumors, the post summarizes a paper by an Apple research team that developed a robot with expressive movements to see how much more engaging it is than a standard robot. And there’s a video.
The video shows a researcher completing tasks with two robots, one labeled “Expressive” and the other labeled “Functional,” and the former is way more fun.
Here’s why your smart fridge needs an expiration date
Image: Adobe Stock
Have you thought about what you’re going to do when your smart fridge is too old to download its latest software update? While you’d probably replace your phone or computer when its software hits its end of life, your fridge will still keep your food cold even if it can’t stream TikToks like those fancy newer models can.
As connected devices in our homes, such as smart TVs, thermostats, and appliances, grow old and lose security updates, they can potentially become targets to help fuel botnet attacks — and new research by Consumer Reports shows that most owners aren’t aware of the risks.
There’s a hidden message in Amazon’s event invites
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon sent out five different invites to its upcoming product event, and when pieced together, they spell out a familiar word: Alexa, the name of the company’s digital voice assistant.
We assumed the event would be about Alexa’s long-heralded renaissance, and given this message, plus Amazon telling Reuters that the event will be Alexa-focused, it seems certain the new Alexa will arrive this month.
I tried the tech that makes hands-free smart locks actually work
Imagine walking up to your front door and it unlocks — even opens — automatically as you approach. It may sound like the stuff of smart home dreams, but it could soon be a reality, thanks to ultra-wideband (UWB) technology arriving on smart locks.
With its precise, real-time location capabilities, UWB enables a smart lock to react to the presence of your phone or smartwatch as you approach your door, unlocking it with no intervention on your part. Both the lock and your device need a UWB chip, but this touchless experience means there’s no need to pull out your phone, fiddle with keycodes, fingerprints, or, god forbid, an actual key.
Matter plans to fix your home Wi-Fi.
These include features like IPV 6 and multicast discovery, which we want to make sure are consistent and reliable across routers ... The way routers implement their multicast discovery can be broken, and that leads to a pretty bad experience for users ... We need to make Wi-Fi work reliably for all of the IoT use cases.
Here’s another use for that Thread radio in your iPhone.
As well as allowing setup of a Thread device when you don’t have a Thread border router, the Thread radio in the iPhone lets you control devices when the power is out:
But the other important factor is the ability to use your accessories, and some important ones, like your front door lock when there’s a power outage. If you have no infrastructure — your Wi-Fi router is down, your Thread border router is down — and you still want the ability to get into your house or do other things that might be smart home related. Those are some use cases that it’s explicitly designed for, but it’s not limited to that.
mmWave tech is set to take motion sensing to the next level in the smart home.
The radar-based technology can detect movements as slight as breathing, so it won’t turn the lights out on you when you’re sitting on the couch.
Superior to PIR sensing, mmWave is seeing fast adoption, with Samsung seemingly poised to add it to its appliances. Here’s a great explainer from The Ambient on how the tech could help your smart home.
Matter will be better in 2025 — say the people who make it
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Here’s the tech that could turn millions of Zigbee light bulbs into motion sensors with a single update
Lights that turn on when you walk into a room and turn off when you leave are one of the most desirable smart home features. But you need to buy additional hardware like motion sensors to make this “magic” happen. A new ambient sensing technology called Sensify could make this easier by turning your light bulbs into motion sensors. And it might be landing on a Philips Hue bridge near you very soon.
Sensify is a wireless network sensing (WNS) technology developed by Ivani that can turn mains-powered Zigbee devices into motion sensors for controlling your lights with just a firmware update — no additional hardware needed. The best part is that it can work on devices already in most homes. “There are tens of millions of devices with the base firmware already out there; we’re just working on the final touches to light up the full experience,” Ivani cofounder Justin McKinney tells The Verge.
These POE smart shades are the first to work with Matter.
SmartWings, one of the first to offer Matter over Thread smart shades, has another first. Today, the company announced its Matter over Ethernet smart shades, which use a single cable to provide power and connectivity — no batteries, Thread, or Wi-Fi required.
Matter compatibility means the shades, which come in roller, zebra, and woven styles, will work with Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Alexa, and other smart home platforms.
You can now control your LG appliances with Homey.
The LG ThinQ app for Homey is available now for both cloud-based and hub-based setups and lets you add connected LG washers, dryers, TVs, and more to Homey and control them directly or with automations.
The Google Home app will soon support the Nest Protect
Image: The Verge
Will the last device leaving the Nest app please turn out the lights? The day finally arrived; Google has announced it’s transitioning the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm to the Google Home app. This means you’ll be able to get alerts and notifications for your alarm directly through Google Home, as well as hush alarms, according to a blog post from Google. This means you no longer need the Nest app for any device, but you can still use it — for now, at least.
The Nest Protect was the last device that could only be accessed and controlled from the Nest app, following Google’s efforts over the last couple of years to fully port its Nest cameras and other devices to the Home app. With this move, Google will finally be able to sunset the Nest app, although the company has said it will keep it in maintenance mode indefinitely.
Robot vacuums just keep growing
There were a slew of innovations in robot vacuums on the CES show floor this year, from arms and legs to extendable mops, movable towers, and new navigation systems.
As the industry races ahead in its quest to find the best way to clean our floors, it can be hard to see the function through all the hype. I spent the last week in Las Vegas hanging with our robot friends to find out just how much better they’re getting. Here’s a look at all the new tech that came out and how it could help keep your floors sparklingly clean.
This mechanical keyboard can control your smart home.
ThirdReality’s MK1 Magic Keyboard ($80, launching March) is a Matter smart button. Ingenious!
The function keys are programmable buttons. Just press to activate a scene or control smart devices like lights through Apple Home, SmartThings, or Home Assistant. Mechanical keyboard / smart home nerds rejoice!
Nanoleaf brought smart lighting for the face to CES.
So, of course, I had to go try it out. This $150 LED Light Therapy Face Mask is the smart lighting company’s first lighting-focused wellness product, and it sounds like there may be more to come. I think it’s rather fetching ... don’t you?
This robovac has an arm — and legs, too
I’ll see your arm and raise you an arm and two legs. It was the battle of the bots on the CES show floor as robot vacuum manufacturers Dreame and Roborock each added limbs to their rival robovacs.
Dreame launched its X50 Ultra at the show earlier this week, debuting the first robovac that can use its legs to navigate steps and room transitions up to 6cm high. But elsewhere at the show, competitor Roborock was showing off its latest flagship, the Saros Z70, which has an arm that can pick up items like socks.
The best smart locks you can buy right now
Illustration: The Verge
A smart lock is an easy solution to some common problems. Locked yourself out? Need to let a friend in to water the plants? Your latchkey kid lost their key? Hands are full, and it’s raining cats and dogs? A smart lock solves all of these problems and more.
One of the best smart home upgrades you can make, a smart lock gives you remote control over access to your house from anywhere, plus easy, key-free ways to unlock and lock your door. Smart locks also remember everything that happened, so they can tell you when and sometimes who unlocked your door.
The best budget robot vacuums
Illustration: The Verge
Today’s robot vacuums are becoming a bit like cars: with all the features, upgrades, and fancy trimmings available these days, it’s easy to forget that they can just be simple machines that get us from point A to point B. Yes, some bots blow hot air on their bums (mop pads) and deftly navigate dog poop, but there are plenty of basic budget robot vacuums that just do a decent job of cleaning your floor autonomously — as long as you tidy up first.
While higher-priced, higher-powered robot vacuums clean better, budget bots do a perfectly good job, especially if you run them regularly. The biggest downside of cheaper models is they get stuck on cables, socks, shoelaces, and other paraphernalia you leave lying around. If you’re home and can untangle it, great, but if you’re not, then it will just sit there stuck until its battery dies, and you have to charge it up again before it will clean your floors.
This cat tree is also an air purifier
What if your cat tower could weigh your furry friend, monitor its health, and help keep their pesky dander spores out of your air? That’s the idea behind LG’s new AeroCatTower, an air purifier with a cat-friendly dome-shaped seat on top for your feline to curl up in.
The company showcased the gadget at its CES 2025 booth this week, complete with some rather creepy-looking fake cats.
LG’s new smart speaker has heart eyes.
This cute little guy is all over LG’s CES booth, winking at people and offering them popcorn.
The LG On-Device AI Hub (great name) is a smart speaker with a 4-inch screen, built-in camera, and microphone. Designed to be a satellite to the ThinQ ON home hub, LG says it’s a concept product, so there’s no price or release date.
1/3The speaker has a circular LCD screen that shows animated eyes. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Yes, I’m taking a picture of Vee with a door lock.
Lockly’s latest smart lock, the Vision Prestige, shows your visitor through a built-in camera. It’s a neat concept, but bending down to see who’s at the front door feels a tad awkward.
The video was also quite dark, and the screen was tiny, but it showed the visitor instantly — not always the case when pulling up a feed from a video doorbell on your smartphone.
Narwal’s latest mopping robovac keeps corners clean
Image: Narwal
Narwal, the company behind our favorite mopping robot, just announced a new flagship robovac called the Flow that’s capable of cleaning closer to walls and corners. The Flow comes with a track-driven mop pad that extends to reach the edge of walls, while also using dual water tanks to keep the mop clean and remove dirty water.
It sounds similar to the extending, self-cleaning roller mop we saw on Ecovacs’ Deebot X8 Omni Pro robovac. The Flow comes with an anti-tangle side brush that extends to reach corners and a brush cover that sits closer to the ground and automatically increases suction up to 20,000Pa on surfaces like carpet.
Eureka’s new robot vac can tackle wet messes
Most robot vacuum mops can tackle mopping your floors and maybe scrub up a dried-on stain, but let them trundle through a puddle of spilled milk or juice, and they’re likely to smear the liquid around. If they do suck any up, it could seriously damage the robot’s internals — robot vacuums are not wet / dry vacs.
Robot vacuum manufacturer Eureka claims to have solved this problem with its new J15 Max Ultra ($1,299). According to the company, this robot vacuum and mop, debuting at CES 2025, can accurately spot liquids and automatically rotate its body to tackle wet spills with its mopping pads.
Eufy’s new robovac transforms into a handheld vacuum
Eufy is making it easier to splurge on a robot vacuum with a new model that can clean more than just your floors. The Eufy 3-in-1 E20 has a unique design that transforms from an autonomous robovac to a manual stick or handheld vacuum by removing a unit containing the motor, dust bin, and battery and then attaching other cleaning accessories.
The E20 is available for preorder starting today for $499.99 through Eufy’s website with a $50 discount. It will officially be available starting on February 10th through additional retailers, including Amazon and Best Buy, for its full price of $549.99.
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