HomeTech.fm - Episode 309 - WWDC20 Roundup

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 26th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, not joined of course by Jason this week. He is taking a much needed vacation out in the woods. You know, I guess he found some kind of lake or pond or something to go fish out of and uh they were just having a blast it was like so uh congrats to jason for being able to take a vacation i'm very envious if you can't tell um i've been meaning to go down to the beach but here in florida that's kind of like one of those things that's frowned upon these days just because

there's so many people down there so i haven't't been able to make it down there and just been kind of stuck in the house, generally doing, you know, the quarantining thing, I guess is what they call it, quarantining. That sounds like a drink. It should be. Anyway, this week, not much in the way of news other outside of like Apple. Apple was it for the beginning of the week.

And I kind of want to go over a little bit of that and touch on some of the things that they were able to introduce into their ecosystem to kind of, you can see the Apple ecosystem kind of coming together and all these little things that used to be different projects and have found successes or failures in their own right

are kind of like gelling together finally. Some are still shaky. Some are looking a lot better than they used to. But you can see the power of a single platform integration being made between, you know, the camera team on the HomeKit side and the Apple TV team. Like that's something that no other vendor is going to be able to provide. And it's very interesting to watch this happen at this level and at this scale, because this is stuff that has been in play for custom home integrators for, I don't know, decades, right? This is stuff that we've been doing for the past 10, 20, 30 years, depending on how long you've been in the industry.

But now it's available to consumers in a way that is easy, approachable, and just kind of makes sense to people. And anybody could go out and buy a $30 iHome or ConnectSense, ConnectSense a little bit more, but definitely worth it, outlet switch switch, plug that in and get it up and going. And that's not something that can be said about most custom install products, right? Like you'll have the quality on both sides, right? You'll have a product that you can install and it'll work and turn on and off when you want it to.

That feature set, that checkbox is checked off, right? And setting it up, you know, integrators, we demand of our manufacturers that things are easy to set up and fix and repair. And that gets checked off here too. So what is left? Well, what is left is the complication. And that is starting, now don't get me wrong, it's still very complicated to set some of these things up and still can be very confusing for people like myself. I mean, I've, I've run into problems setting up HomeKit devices where I'm just like, why is this happening?

I do not like this. I bought a couple of Wemo switches for, you know, like Christmas tree, Christmas lights around. They were on sale, pretty good sale this year at like Costco or something. So I picked up a couple and I got them home. And of course, you know, they didn't connect. They didn't work right out of the box. It was a painful install as far as I could tell. But once they were up and going, all good, nothing to worry about. So it's not and it's not something that I couldn't figure out using the app like the app walked me through all the, you know, default settings and that kind of thing where you have to press and hold the button or whatever. So it wasn't that big of a deal. But it is something that like, that is still a small roadblock for a lot of people

to get into this. So I don't think that Apple is like a threat to the custom install industry at all, though. Don't get me wrong there. But I do think that it's something that we should all watch. We should all keep an eye on and we shall realize this stuff actually does work a little bit better than we're giving it credit for, especially on like what the size and scope of projects that can be put in with this. Like you, you know, I run HomeKit and my house and I run it connected with a third party application called HomeBridge, which ties into my Control 4 system, and it basically brings all my Control 4 lighting into HomeKit. And I don't use the Control 4 app anymore for lighting or really much of anything anymore because everything is available so quickly through HomeKit. And I can go in there,

beep, boop, boop, push a few buttons and everything's done. So I'd encourage you, if you're an integrator, you are even tangentially involved in the Apple ecosystem, you may want to go down at the very least and grab a $30 outlet switch off the shelf at Best Buy and take a look at how easy it is to go from, you know, start to finish with it and what it can do, especially with some of the newer updates that they have here coming up in iOS 14. It's going to get a whole lot easier for everybody. And they're starting to kind of like push out automations in front of people. So that's that's from an automation standpoint, from like an automation geek standpoint. That's a really cool thing. And I'm glad to see more people being presented with

the option of doing something automatic that they may just do every night or they may do every morning and not realize it. And to have it like a computer do it for you, that's magic. That's what we're all here for, right? So I'm glad to see that put out. Let's go ahead and jump in. No news this week, no Home Tech headlines. I might have a pick of the week. I'll have to go and look at that. But let's go ahead and jump into the Apple keynote and talk a little bit about that and what all of the things that were announced. And I also kept tally of Jason and my bet. I'm going to hold this towards the end and kind of add things up. I think we both won. We'll check the scores here at the end and see what the total score is and go from there. Okay, well, this week was the Worldwide Developer Conference, or WWDC.

Of course, there is no event out in California to go to. So everyone is kind of huddled around their computer screens at homes watching what has actually turned out to be a way better event, I think, from somebody who can't afford, you know, the what, six to nine thousand dollars or whatever it was that takes to go out to this conference. They are doing an online conference that seems to be working out pretty well. So I was very impressed with the opening keynote. I liked watching it. If you haven't seen it, go see it. It's pretty much a two-hour commercial for Apple, but it's done well. It's very fast paced. And if you kind of like the Apple stuff and you're into the Apple ecosystem, use maybe a Mac. It's probably worth checking out. There were a lot of new features and software updates that were introduced for the Mac and iOS that were pretty compelling. I mean, they kind of playing catch up here and there. They're doing things that others aren't in some respects. But

overall, pretty good year, it seems, for updates on the software. But what we concentrate here on the Home Tech podcast is stuff that relates around the home, right? So what I found most interesting about this, and when Jason and I were sitting down taking bets or actually talking about what we were going to talk about to take bets on on the show, we're just like, should we even just say they're going to, like they're probably not even going to mention HomeKit.

They're not going to mention anything to do with the home. There were a couple rumors floating around out there that some camera updates things were going to get. And so we, you know, it was, it was a gamble. We had no idea if the camera is going to be updated. The camera interface would be updated. We had no idea if these other rumors were true. You know, they're just rumors. Apple could easily, you know, gloss past that and, and maybe release it at any other time, but no, no, Apple's been an incredible eight minutes talking about the home, the home. It was actually an entire section devoted to just talking about home technologies that Apple provides. Of course, this is primarily focused around like HomeKit,

but also updates to the Apple TV. And, you know, they even had a full commercial in there for a new Apple TV Plus show that they would have coming in the future. But let's go ahead and just kind of take a look at what they talked about with home in general. You know, it started off with Craig Federico. I think he's the gentleman who's over like all of software basically on Apple.

So he's kind of one of the head honchos there. He kind of introduced this segment that they were talking, they kind of like labeled home and they wanted to kind of point out these, these three things that Apple believes in for technology, different homes. It's easy to use both in the initial setup and everyday use. Okay. They've got that in some respects. Privacy, of course, is always a big hit for Apple right now. They've been banging on that drum for a long time.

And that things work together. They seamlessly work together without headaches. That's one of the primary reasons HomeKit was made. So I think those three initiatives or those three guiding principles for home technologies are three really good ones that they can stick to and promote their products with. And this started like an eight minute discussion on the new newer updates and features that we'd see in the HomeKit and everything. So first up, what they talked about with HomeKit was that they, I thought this was interesting. As they were introducing the HomeKit segment, they were talking about a new alliance that they had formed with Amazon and Google to basically, you know, among others, I think Amazon, Google, Zigbee's in there,

Ikea is part of it. This was announced sometime towards the end of last year i remember uh and it has the name of connected home over ip and i think everybody's calling that chips right so the chip standard and um i i thought this was interesting there's one small statement that they made in there it said home kit or this new standard will work across all of your apple devices so it's kind of interesting it leads me to believe that or this new standard will work across all of your Apple devices. So it's kind of interesting. It leads me to believe that whenever this new standard comes out, you know, that Apple is really committing itself to supporting it.

I don't know. We'll see what happens. The standard doesn't exist. It's not out. But I'm wondering if this is going to, you know, if they're able to get what they want to work within this new standard, like maybe this standard would replace HomeKit or work within the HomeKit ecosystem. I just thought that was fascinating that Apple would not only be talking about HomeKit, but this other new standard that doesn't exist, that they're a part of an alliance with other larger companies to hopefully make products work a little bit better together in the future. So I was just glad to hear that, I guess.

And I'm glad to see them talking about it. So let's talk about the iOS 14 HomeKit updates. A couple of interesting things they have there. When you add a new device in, like a light bulb or something, that's kind of the example they gave, the device will automatically give you automation suggestions after you add it into your home. So pretty easy with an iPhone,

you walk up to the device, you can tap it. If it has the new NFC thing that's in there, you can tap on the device itself. It'll go ahead and add that. It'll do a little card thing. It'll pop up and say, do you want to add this light in? Boom, you'll add it in. But now it'll also give you suggestions for maybe turning it off when you a suggestions for maybe turning it off when you leave the house or turning it on when you get home. That is something I think a lot of people missed with HomeKit. Initially, you know, they got everything in, they can control it from their phone, they can yell at Siri, do a couple things. But setting up those automations, you know, as easy as they are, I don't think a lot of people, even myself, haven't done or gotten into. So that's very encouraging. I'm glad to see them do that. They have a new look to the home app, which I thought was interesting. I did not think they

would update this at all, but they're giving like more of a visual status of the priority devices across the top. Right now there's like a text there that kind of tells you what devices are and aren't working, which is kind of annoying. It's been that way since the very beginning. If you click on it, it gives you like more info as to what's going on there. But I've never liked that. Like it's just been kind of like some wasted space. And I'm glad to see that, you know, they're going to give you those, you know, devices that you operate quite a bit, or, you know, it thinks that that you are going to use. I'm glad it gives you those kind of like upfront and on the top. Some of the big banner headline features that they they've added a new the newest feature, I guess is what we call the adaptive

lighting feature. And of course, this is what we probably would call in our industry circadian lighting or something like that. I'm not a fan of that name. Adaptive lighting, way better of a name than I think anybody in this industry has dreamed up. It sounds so much better than we should all just everything, everything that does this, that changes automatically adjusted as the color temps throughout the day. Um, but we should just change it to adaptive lighting that makes it simple. It says what it does and it's lighting that adapts to your time of day. Uh, so, uh, this is a really cool feature. Uh, I, I am, I was on the, uh, Resi week podcast this week, and we had a small little discussion towards the end of the podcast about this because I literally stopped watching the keynote and hopped on the podcast call. So it's kind of like my raw, unfiltered thoughts as I came out of the keynote and was done kind of watching all the

things that the Apple was doing. Um, but I do think this is interesting. This is going to be an interesting time where, um, we as integrators and, and technology professionals are going to be selling premium products that do the same thing as something you can get for $30 at, you know, the Ikea or the Apple store. Now, we can argue semantics about that all day long. But, you know, if you're just going down the list of checkboxes, yes, it does adaptive lighting. Yes, this does adaptive lighting. Yes, this one costs $22,000. Yes, this one costs $30. So or $900 to do your entire house and this one is is $30,000. There's going to be a big difference in those price tags between the consumer gear that is roughly performing the same as the high-end gear that you and I are all putting in. Let's leave finishes off the table. Let's leave

all that other stuff off the table because I know that you can get better performance and everything out of something that that is specifically designed to do this. But this will be an interesting conversation for us to to have moving forward. I think what it amounts to is we're going to have to hold our manufacturers feet to the fire a little bit to demand, you know, better integrations and maybe integrations with this home kit thing. Like, yeah, we can do that. And you know, we can do a lot better. We can have quality lights that have decent CRI levels to them. I mean, there's all sorts of cool things that we can do above and beyond what, you know, a simple Philips Hue light bulb is going to be able to do in an apartment, which I think, you know, they're

aiming for the mass market and the luxury market is completely different, completely different set of problems and, and solutions that you have to come up with. So I understand all that, but, uh, it is, it will be an interesting conversation, uh, to, to, to install, maybe, maybe say you installed a Lutron system and it doesn't have this adaptive lighting. Um, your neighbor goes to the neighbor next door or your, your client goes to the neighbor next door and they have this adaptive lighting. They say, I want that. And you go, oh man, this is just a Radio Raw 2 system. How am I going to do that? That's when I think our manufacturers are going to have to step up and start introducing these features into their current lineup somehow. I don't know how they're going to do it, but they're going to have to do it. Another headlining feature

was at activity zones and cameras. This literally looks like any other activity zone, like any other camera you've ever seen on the market. I don't really know why this was a headlining feature other than it's just like something new that they've done. But if you have a ring doorbell, a ring camera, literally anything else. I mean, my ubiquity cameras have the same little like drag this little dot over here and make like a little outline of an activity zone. Almost every single security camera that kind of even the higher end ones, they have a lot of those like little activity zones you can draw things on and can actually tell who is, you know, entering and exiting that zone. So I'm not sure why this was as big of a feature

as they made it out to be, but I guess it's helpful to have it, especially in a system that didn't have it before. Face recognition, though. I don't know. This one seems kind of cool. You can use any HomeKit-enabled camera, a doorbell, to recognize who is at your door based on photos that were tagged in your Photos app, which means that you have to know the person at your front door. It can't be like the UPS guy. So I don't know how you're, unless you run out and take a picture of you, UPS guy, and then like type that into your phone, tag it as UPS guy. Like, I don't know how that's going to work, but, um, it is a nice little feature, um, that they

are enabling and you get like decent alerts off that it'll say you know Ashley is at the front door and that kind of thing so that that's kind of nice I'm glad to see it finally coming to HomeKit I will be curious as how this works and I don't know of too many HomeKit enabled doorbells at this time I think there's a couple they don't look great that's still my biggest problem with IP doorbells they They just don't look great. And ring is really the only one that has gotten close to something I was allowed to put on, you know, that, that is allowed to be put on the front of the house. Like, uh, by me, even like, I wouldn't put some of these things that just like, they look like robot things that ended up on your front door somehow. Like you want to swat it off of the room or something. I don't know. Um, the ring, the ring

seems to have a better design aesthetic than most of them. So, uh, I will be interested to see what is available for home kit, uh, in the near future. We we've all heard that ring would have that, but they, I mean, man, they, they haven't had that in years. They've been talking about it. It's been promised. I'm wondering if it's ever going to ever going to happen simply because, you know, they were kind of purchased by Amazon in the middle of all this. And Amazon is a competitor. So I just I don't know how it's going to work. Like when will it work? When will it ever work? I still go in their, uh, their Twitter feed from time to time and see somebody ask that question. And, you know, they always respond like it's

coming. We promise. But man, I've, I've seen that for years. So I can't say that's ever going to happen. Um, so I, I don't know how those two systems would work together for this, but it certainly would be nice to, you know, use the ring pro doorbell that I have currently, heck, I'd even upgrade. Like if it was a Ring Pro Plus doorbell that I'd have to, or Gen 2, I can upgrade for that. I'd like to have the Ring video feed go directly into HomeKit. So I can do some of this facial recognition, plus some of the other features we'll talk about here in a second around Apple TV. Apple TV was part of the home discussion. So no, HomeKit wasn't talked for a full 10 minutes almost. It was like HomeKit and Apple TV. And Apple TV got a pretty good update. First off, 4K YouTube, like 4K YouTube videos be able to be played on Apple TV, which

is great because I think that feature has been missing for a long time. Picture-in-picture support across the entire ecosystem. So I will be, as a side note, we'll be curious if that is brought to the YouTube. Like YouTube is notorious on your phone. If you don't pay them that pesky, like it's just an advertisement for their YouTube Red service or whatever it is. And like it's constantly annoying you. And unless you pay for it, you, you, you can't like minimize the app or go into a picture in picture or anything like that. Like,

so I will be curious to see what, if YouTube actually implements the picture in picture portion on, uh, on Apple TV and, and on your iPhone too, they're going to be doing picture in picture there too. Um, big things around multi-user support for games. I know they mentioned for games, but I want to say for apps as well, uh, like for video apps, I want to say I saw a session related to that, um, where there's like a little control panel that you can pop out on the Apple TV interface itself. You can switch a user real quick and, um, launch an app and you can kind of resume your game from there it's kind of the example they gave um i know that uh that feature kind of exists already but it's not as exposed and i don't

think it gets as much use um unless you really really need to use it most most of the time when you launch like the hbo app uh you can swap swap out out the users there rather than having to do it at the system level. But it is kind of nice to be able to go to the system level, swap over to the users, and then every app you launch is yours. So hopefully they'll get there with this update. I mentioned earlier that Apple TV Plus service was, they did an entire commercial off that, but they did plug, I saw something interesting here, that the Apple TV Plus service would, they did an entire commercial off that, but they did plug, I saw something

interesting here, that the Apple TV Plus service would be coming to Sony and Vizio smart TVs this summer, later this summer. So no Apple TV box needed at all for that. It kind of falls into the streaming news section, but there you go. I guess we already talked about 4K YouTube, but if you don't have an Apple TV, you do have a Sony TV or Vizio, you'll be able to get the Apple TV Plus service. It's kind of cool. Another 4K announcement, the Photos app. When you AirPlay a video or photo over to the Apple TV, that AirPlay connection typically wasn't full 4K, and now it will be with iOS 14. So this is a huge improvement. You know, typically you're shooting, you can shoot videos in 4K on your iPhone. It's got a great camera, great video

camera in it. But when you airplay it up to the TV, you lose a little bit. And now that won't be the case. You should be able to get the full 4K picture, I'm sure in HDR, which will look really nice on some of the bigger, larger sets, OLED sets and 4k HDR sets should look great. And then another small feature, but I think it's kind of big was audio sharing for AirPods. So you can take two sets of AirPods and connect them to a single Apple TV at the same time. And you can let multiple users watch movies and TV shows without disturbing others. I do this all the time. I'm sitting in the living room, want to watch something.

I'll connect my AirPods up to the Apple TV. It's pretty easy to do. It'll switch over to them and I can listen to whatever. Having the audio sharing, I think it's just interesting. It's a nice little feature set to have. And that brings us to the updates that I know everybody was waiting for HomePod. Yes. Yes. So, so far we had Jason score his points with HomeKit getting announcement. Guess what? HomePod actually got a mention on stage and got a couple updates. So, um, got a couple of pictures on screen too. I was shocked. Uh, but you know, the HomePod exists.

It lives. I can't believe it. One of the biggest features they announced was during the facial recognition segment. If the doorbell recognizes who's at the front door, your HomePod will actually announce into your house who's at the front door, which is kind of cool if you think about it. Like, this is the integration between like two to three different products. Right. So you have your Apple TV, which will give you a little pop up picture and picture of whoever rings your doorbell. Your HomePod will announce who's there and your HomeKit doorbell, you know, will record all that up to the cloud securely. Great. Just a great product lineup. I think it's pretty cool to have like all of these little

different consumer devices that you can kind of pull it around. And all of a sudden you've got a decent, uh, on home automation system for nothing. Um, you're probably going to have these devices anyway. Uh, the only thing you don't need on top is some, you know, third-party software trying to tie it all together. This is all done first party in-house. And I think that's the power of all of this. The second HomePod feature that wasn't quite mentioned, but I'm glad that they showed it on a slide and I'll put a picture of it. I actually make it the cover art for this entire thing. It's a very small bullet point. At the end of the discussion, third party music servicers coming to HomePod. I am so excited about that. I might

actually dig the HomePods back out of their boxes and set them back up just for Spotify. I'm really hoping to see Spotify come to the HomePod because the Apple Music service really wasn't that compelling. We already have Spotify. Everybody likes using it. But the problem is, is that the Apple Music service, the app was just horrible to use. I couldn likes using it. But the problem is, is that the Apple Music Service, the app was just horrible to use. I couldn't use it. So I'm glad third party music services are finally coming to HomePod and hopefully we'll start seeing more improvements in the HomePod ecosystem in the future. But this year, I guess those two bullet points, two checkboxes knocked off for HomePod. So not only does HomePod get a point, I get a point.

So Jason gets a point. I get a point. I think we both were both winners this year, which is surprising. Honestly, we really thought that the HomePod was not going anywhere. And I really didn't think that that HomeKit was going to get much of announcements or anything. There weren't even any sessions this year that I can tell scheduled around HomeKit and to talk about these new technologies. So it looks like it's just going to be from Apple, a continual development and iteration and refinement of the product that they already have. And what I think we saw this year was the integrations with other teams and what I guess you would traditionally call like business units within the same company. Like the Apple TV team

probably wasn't talking to the HomeKit team for very long. Like there was a little bit of software that the Apple TV team was like, yeah, you can put this on the HomeKit and you can run a hub off of the Apple TV. But there was no interface or anything that surfaced in the Apple TV that indicated that the Apple TV run a hub off of the Apple TV, but there was no interface or anything that surfaced in the Apple TV that indicated that the Apple TV was a hub.

That was in the Home app, which was way over here on the other side. Now you have like a complete control center. You have integration with a HomeKit camera. You can tell Siri on your Apple TV remote to show the backyard camera, and a picture-in-picture will come up, and you can go full screen on it.

This is completely different from what we see from other companies. It's just interesting to see all of this start to come together and be integrated together and supported together. And it's an iteration that takes time, takes a lot of effort. This is not easy stuff to do,

especially when you put in that privacy stance that they have. It's very hard to do with making sure everything's secured and anonymized and everything. So kudos to Apple for getting this stuff updated and out. And with that, I think I'll wrap up our WWDC coverage. It was a lot of fun to watch. If you haven't seen it, the presentation, I think you can watch that on the special events page on Apple.

I'll put a link in the show notes over at hometech.fm slash 309. Don't forget, you can join us most nights in the chat room live, Wednesdays, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. I do have a pick of the week this week. I will, um, I'll put this out. This is kind of, this is me being geeky, but, uh, I noticed this the other day when I went to check my internet speed and, uh, I, I saw that there was a little, little developer

buttons at the bottom of, uh, speed test.net. And when I clicked on it, uh's a little program that you can download for your command line that you can run. You can just type in speedtest at your command line, and it'll give you a speed test. You know, you don't have to go to a website. You don't have to open a web browser. You can just open the command line. It works on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD. So kind of all of anything and everything that you could possibly ever want it to work on. Let's see, Linux, I386, x8664, ARM32, 32HF, and ARM64. So I think that covers quite a bit on the Linux side,

like Raspberry Pi and that kind of thing. So you can actually run this from the command line, speed test, and it's not like the graphical interface you get on the website. It just gives you the text and everything. But it's a whole lot, you know, less, you know, to run a terminal program. It's a lot less heavy than opening up an entire web browser

and typing in speed test and waiting for that. Like, it just seems to me easier, kind of geeky, but also handy to have in some situations. So check that out. It's at speedtest.net slash app slash CLI. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show and tunes in

to listen, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about the inside baseball conversations all around home technology and you

know we had a lively discussion in there about uh things that happened at wwdc so check that out but if you want to help but can't support the show financially, we totally understand that. We'd appreciate you. If you could give a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice, we're aiming for that five-star show. Hopefully able to do that every week. All right.

That wraps up this week. Short show ish. I guess I rambled on for 30 minutes about Apple technologies and I only had like half a page of notes to go off of. So I hope I relayed enough information for everybody to kind of take away a little bit from that. We'll get back next week with news and all the other good stuff. I think we even have an interview lined up for next week. So we'll take a look at that then.

But for now, have a great weekend, everybody. And we'll chat with you next week.