5 days ago • 76%

Apple might be working on a smart doorbell | TechCrunch

techcrunch.com Apple might be working on a smart doorbell | TechCrunch

There’s been a lot of reporting in recent months around Apple’s efforts to expand its footprint in customers’ homes with in-development products like a

50 comments

Wait. Let me guess. It's about 600 dollars overpriced, requires proprietary wiring, is not repairable (because Tim Cook believes you are leasing it from apple), requires an Internet connection to perform a basic function that has worked for over 100 years without AI, oh and it doesn't have an actual button to reduce waste. You are supposed to use your old one or buy an apple button for another 600 dollars. Also, it stops working or slows down after a year and for some reason you need a subscription to use it.

34
- Apple is pretty much the only company in the smart home space right now that not only allows, but requires that devices be able to function locally, without having to call home. They CAN call home, but they continue to work just fine locally if say, the internet is down. It’s a central tenant of their homekit standard.
  
  44
  
  Shhhh, you’ll derail a perfectly good hate-train with that kind of information.
  
  9
- Maybe it only allows people with an iPhone to ring your doorbell. Everyone else has to knock and then the doorbell just teases you the whole time to shame you into buying an iPhone.
  
  6
- Don't forget the pro wall mount is $599
  
  3
- You forgot the last part, people will flock to it. /s
  
  2
  
  Door locks are something that needs to just work. I’m not going to take off my gloves and fiddle with a combination in the cold, nor am I going to hope my fingerprint works despite dry cracked skin. I understand Bluetooth is painfully slow. Home key seems best and everyone I know has a iPhone but conceivably some people may not. There are a lot of solutions that don’t “just work”, but maybe Apple can do it. Responsiveness. Reliability. Convenience. Just works. For all.
  
  3
- I see you work in their PR department
  
  1
How long have people been trying to make smart homes a thing? I feel like this would have happened by now if there was a real mass market for them. It’s not like there is a huge technological impediment to achieving that vision, like there is for VR/AR. In other ways it’s just like VR, a cool idea that’s been around forever, but doesn’t seem to have widespread application or demand.

If apple is really working on this, I consider it further evidence that they are really really struggling to have a substantive vision of the future. Other than incremental improvement of existing products and financially beneficial business maneuvers, what have they done in the last decade other than try to grasp at old sci-fi notions of ‘the future’. I suspect that this can’t change until they get new leadership. Of course, they’ve largely achieved escape velocity in terms of revenue, and are so established now that the money machine will keep working for a long time, independent of any need to be actually visionary.

13
- The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren't enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.
  
  And, of course, one of Apple's biggest strengths is that they've built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.
  
  Right now you've either got 14 apps for different shit, or you've built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I've gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.
  
  It's a shit experience, still, because it's a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can't stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.
  
  I wouldn't bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.
  
  That's really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.
  
  26
  
  The lack of cohesion and the fact that everyone who makes camera stuff is shady as shit.
  
  10
  
  No, the biggest problem with smart homes is that honestly, a switch on the wall that always works, even when you don't have your phone on you and even in the dark when you are half asleep is a pretty optimal interface for things like lights.
  
  5
  
  With the new Matter/Thread standard, we may finally have a unified market where everything works together, and Apple is one of the sponsors of that. With Apple, Amazon and Google all supporting it and adding it to their devices, there’s too huge an already established base to ignore. Of course it’s rolling out frustratingly slowly, but something like this could be the sark that ignites it
  
  1
  
  I don’t doubt apple’s ability to make this work well. I do doubt that there is more than a niche market for it. I also think it’s boring, and for some reason, I still expect apple to do better.
  
  3
- The home automation field is potentially going through a revolution with the new Matter/Thread standard, that Apple helped define. Devices are much more likely to work together and they should not be calling home. Apple already has the Apple TV and whatever the speaker is that can act as automation hubs, and HomeKit software across their product line to provide nice dashboards, shared across your family, integrate with local Siri, etc.
  
  3
  
  My HomeKit automation makes my friends who spend a ton of time researching and setting shit up look silly.
  
  I hate saying it but my automation just works, and they’re still in the perpetual tinker stage.
  
  1
- I vaguely looked into it when I bought my first home and ultimately decided that it was more trouble than it was worth. You basically either have to pay a subscription fee for some company to do all the processing for you, and they're liable to either increase the price on you, or go bankrupt. Or you need to run your own server.
  
  Who can be bothered?
  
  1
  
  These days your home automation hub can be an Apple TV, or Amazon Echo device, or many similar, there’s really not much to bother with and many people already have it.
  
  The new Matter/Thread standard continues to slow rollout with the promise of unifying smart devices that had been scattered across several different paradigms, and should just work together (and without the s scription r having to hope the manufacturer keeps its portal running.
  
  Not to push but if you were considering home automation but those were blocking issues, you should look again
  
  1
It's the lowest entry point into smart homes.

11
- Only if you put it outside the basement door
  
  6
  
  DaaaAaaD!!
  
  0
- I dont have a smart doorbell because I cant decide which to get. I am screwed by indecision if this is the lowest barrier for entry.
  
  1
  
  I don't want anything that records to the cloud, because then I don't control the footage. And pretty much all of them do that now...
  
  1
- In that it will appeal most to the people at the lowest end of the IQ range?
  
  -7

You've viewed 50 comments.