Prashant Gopal, writing for Bloomberg:
Tap your phone, and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasts. Tap again, and the bath runs at a blissful 101 degrees. Sweet, right? Of course, your dad might view it as a bit over the top. All told, $30,000 worth of gadgets and gizmos were on display here, many run with Apple’s free HomeKit app.
And:
Apple is teaming up with a handful of builders and using these kinds of test beds to inch its way into the market for Internet-connected home furnishings, a nascent field that has attracted rivals like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.
At the core of this article is Apple’s strategy to bring your home into the Apple ecosystem. If you buy a home “wired” for HomeKit, you are more likely to move to iOS, buy an iPhone to control it all.
If I go down this road, will my house be worth less if I sell to an Android buyer? When I am looking for a house, will Android vs Brillo (Google’s Internet of Things platform) be part of the realtor’s pitch?
To me I would want a house that high speed fiber connections instead! That should be a stressed point in selling!
Mr. Robot, eps2.0.
I would like ‘iHome’ to work well and be secure… high speed fiber should also not recommend or advertise things.
My iPhone is not reliable enough anymore for me to consider using any of the HomeKit stuff. The idea of uniting iPhone Of Shit with Internet Of Shit doesn’t excite me one bit.
When all this stuff was imagined, there were iPhones where the OS never crashed and the apps were all fun and easy and didn’t require you to learn them before using. It was a totally different proposition a few years ago to put all of your life’s interfaces on iPhone.
I have an original iPad setup as a stereo and guests love it and pass it around and use it to choose songs and nobody ever asks me how to use it and it never crashes or fails to act as the perfect jukebox. I would never replace it with a newer iPad or iPhone because none of those things would be true. The old iPad is the only device I have that will stay reliably attached and just-work with AirPlay. And I would not subject an enemy to the current Apple Music UI, never mind my guests.
As for selling your home, none of this tech will matter because it will be obsolete and worthless by the time you sell, even if that is next year. The buyer will need their own box of crap and their own I-T consultant.
Good luck getting Verizon to keep its promises to build more.