HomeTech.fm - Episode 346 - Apple Motion+

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

This week on Hometech: A quick recap of the week's news and a conversation about the death of the Logitech Harmony remote – even if Logitech doesn't want to admit it. It seems everyone in retail, distribution, and within Logitech knows the product line has been discontinued... so where's the announcement? All this and of course the pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 9th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Welcome to Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of the home technology world and home automation and all that good stuff. This week, we're going to dive into a couple of home tech headlines and some new products that came out. It's kind of cool. Some rumors from Apple, of course, will probably kick off with that because you know rumors are fun uh and of course you got to pick the week this week too um but hey i don't forget i'm gonna keep plugging this until everybody remembers but don't forget that there's uh we've got the home tech talks every week that we're all getting together we're all sitting in a in a zoom chat thing talking for i don't, an hour about anything and everything,

really. This last week, we got together to chat about, I think we talked about the demise, a continued conversation of the demise of the Harmony remote, which was rather entertaining. And I'm warming up to the idea that the remote's just not needed as much as I, I thought it was in at least in five years when all of these go offline completely. It's a sad day. It's a sad day. I still think there's a market out there, but I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure what, how big that market is and how big it'll continue to be. So I don't know that there can, there are people are convincing me in the, in, in the chats and, and another side conversation has been having

about, yeah, Harmony is going offline. They've known it for a couple of years now, but now it's just kind of, the news is kind of slowly leaking out. Um, they haven't said anything still. They must not listen to this show, but, um, I don't know. We're still waiting for it to happen. But we had a great conversation about that. Always a good time. And we actually ended the conversation talking about some lighting stuff. So I'm hoping to get lighting back on the list of things to talk about. But this week we're having a huge event. I think this one will be fun. We're having a Unify Masterclass. So if you're a Unify master, if you've mastered all aspects of Unify or think you know everything there is to know about Unify, there might be something

that you can add to this conversation, or you might be able to learn something from the conversation. We're going to talk to anybody and everybody about all this. I've been using Unify since, I don't know, since I can remember the first Unify access points I installed were square and they had a green light. So if that says how far back I was installing Unify, I don't know if it was very far back, but it's got to be over, I don't know, six or seven years ago now, maybe longer. Ran across the product, switched to it, like the management aspect of it, and started from there. I've been kind of tinkering with it from where I've had it

in my house for a very long time, got a camera system. So I don't know. I consider myself more than a novice at the UniFi line, but I know there's some guys that will be there that'll be able to talk to it a little bit more about some of the things that they've done and are doing with Unify. So if you want to check out that talk, the Home Tech talk, you've got to be a supporter of the show. You've got to be a patron of the show because all the links and everything you need are over the patron page. So hometech.fm slash support, that'll get you there.

And with that, let's jump into the Home Tech headlines. 9 to 5 Mac reports they found references in tvOS 14.5 beta that suggest that 120 hertz support will be on the way. It's coming to a new Apple TV model. These references could be evidence that Apple's been testing out new Apple TV hardware internally that would be able to support the 120 hertz. The current Apple TV 4K doesn't support 120, even with software updates.

It wouldn't be able to do it because it lacks the HDMI 2.1 hardware. Bunch of numbers, basically can't do it, physically can't do it. So with a higher refresh rate, the interface would feel much smoother. Not that it's not that bad right now, but games would definitely benefit from the technology,

as would some like live TV type things, like sports and that kind of thing, would look a lot better. This, of course course would also require a 120 Hertz compatible TV, which I don't know these days, most of them are, it seems like, um, I think it's always exciting to hear or see an Apple TV get updated. These things sit around for years and just get dust on them. It feels like I don't, I can't even remember when the last one, I think the 4K was the last time it got updated. And it hasn't been updated since then. And before that, it was like even a longer time

from the old 1080p puck into where it could actually support higher resolution. I don't know. I like seeing this updated because Apple can stake out having that premium hardware, that premium experience, and basically make like the sports car of the industry. You know, it's basically, I forget what's in there, an A12X. So it's a fairly old chip for Apple that sits in there.

But it's a fast, fast processor. And it can handle a lot of stuff you can throw at it. But if they want to bring this up to speed with current game systems, they're not going to get there with current game systems, but if they want to bring it up to current iOS levels, bring it up into the new chips that they have, they're going to have to update the hardware. And of course, to get 120 hertz and a faster system altogether, they're going to have to update the hardware. And of course, to get 120 hertz and a faster system altogether, they're going to have to update the hardware. So it would be nice to see them do this. That said, I think the line would be pretty good to have a lower-end model to compete alongside with maybe Roku, the Fire TV, Google, the Google TV one,

like a dongle. They could use an Apple TV dongle. Maybe they think they don't do that because I'm pretty sure the Apple TV one, like a dongle, you know, they could use an Apple TV dongle. Maybe they think they don't do that because I'm pretty sure like the Apple TV plus app is on all of those systems now. So I don't know. We'll see. Rumored Apple event coming up in April. So we'll see if something comes up then. Also, there's been a couple of like remote rumors that have been going around. I don't think anybody has has seen, come to fruition anytime soon, but it was sure would be nice to replace this lousy, lousy remote here.

This is, uh, this is yuck. Um, I have the little rubber case on it with the magnet so I can keep up with it and stick it on the bottom of the desk, but it's still, it's still not a great remote. I, I, and they, they really missed the mark when it came to that. So, um, hopefully we'll see something. Maybe, maybe we'll see something. I don't know. T-Mobile, T-Mobile has finally launched their wireless home internet service

to more than 30 million eligible households. The pilot program started way back in 2019 for 50,000 homes in rural and underserved areas. So nearly 10 million of the 30, so about a third of the homes that they have launched this service to will be in those rural and small towns that have basically no access to internet, no access to high speed internet at least. And they have or they have like uncompetitive, like no real internet, like DSL or something like that. So this is good. This is great news for those types of those types of people out there. If you have a house like this, you can expect to get up to 100 megabits per second, which if you're on DSL, that's great. And 5G will actually do lower latency as well. So that's all in all, are huge for anybody who doesn't have access to that kind of thing. Minimum speeds will be around

50 megabits a second, I saw, and get this, the company's saying unlimited data, so no data caps and no data throttling either. So it's actually true high-speed internet, which is good, which is good. It's all 5G powered or 5G slash 4G powered using this gateway that you can put in your home. And it's not very hard to install the gateway. It's just like a plug-in. You plug it in, and they've got an app that kind of walks you through it. Looks like a pretty good deal. $60 a month with the auto pay turned on, no taxes or fees that are added onto that, no equipment fees, no contracts. So it might do well to serve as even a backup internet for some people who need to make sure that they're always online. You know, if the cable goes down, this might be a good way to switch over

to still having a decent high-speed internet. Again, unlimited data, no data caps and throttling. Pretty good. Availability is going to be based on the network capacity, which is increasing all the time. And as well as having,

I thought this was funny, as well as having the Wi-Fi gateway inventory, which has been limited by the global supply chain shortage so like it's every like everything uh internet internet these days um it things everything electronic these days it's a little tough to get some products sometimes so yeah yeah receivers receivers well ring ring Ring launched a couple new products this week. And going back to the newest Video Doorbell Pro, had a built-in radar system that was designed to track a person's journey from wherever they came from to your front door.

So the idea was not only would the device sense the motion of somebody walking up to the front door, but with its radar, they'll be able to tell how far away from the door they are as they get up to the door. If they cut through the lawn, you'll be able to see them there. Well, they've added this feature into the hardware floodlight camera, giving you the same bird's eye view of the house as you're away from the front door, essentially. The Ring Floodlight Camera Pro has a new hd camera enhanced audio 100 100 decibel siren uh color night vision and motion activated lights that can throw up to 2000 lumens and the into the darkness so that's not bad a little upgrade for the floodlight camera and um you can additionally to that it's got the radar built in where you can see basically how somebody wandered

onto your property where they came from uh and, and see exactly kind of like pinpoints where they go along the way. So that'll be nice to get. Um, along with that, they got it. They announced a new doorbell video, the door video doorbell for, I don't like it. That makes up. It's just the doorbell. It's their basic, their baseline, like the main, the mainstream bell, that doorbell that they have. Um, it's got color pre-roll. So the doorbell will start recording about four seconds before video of four seconds of video before the motion event is triggered and upload that. Basically it's got a little, it's got a bigger memory buffer in there to hold that color video and they're touting a new battery life. So nice little updates from Ring. I knew

about, I knew about this radar thing for a while, and I was kind of surprised when they announced the doorbell and didn't announce the floodlight cam, but things are weird right now, and I think products are taking a little bit longer to roll out, I'm sure, than most of these companies want to. So maybe they've just got enough inventory in, and they're able to say that they can ship them.

It's always tough these days. So moving on, moving on. Oops. We moved from Apple rumors and now we're going to move into Ikea rumors. We haven't heard much about Ikea and their Sonos collaboration for a while, but on Instagram, Ikea started teasing out new additions to their Sonos powered Symphonix lineup. Symphonics? Symphonics? I don't know. Let's skip over that. According to a report over in The Verge, uh, published back on Tuesday, um, of the two new products discovered in recent FCC filings, uh, one is a refresh of their existing Symphonisk table lamp. Now it will reportedly cost about the same

as the current ugly 179 model beyond that there's really not too many details about it i'm sure it's going to have a lamp i'm sure it's going to have the little rotary switch on it to dim the the the light bulb inside and then uh then from what they were saying, they could have like different, like the current Symphonix lamp came in one color, I think. This one could have like shade options and that kind of thing. So there's all sorts of rumors out there, but no one really knows.

Second new product they have planned is reportedly a hidden speaker that can double as an art piece. Not too sure what that means, but they think it's gonna be like, it could be something that hangs on the wall, like an art print hangs on a wall or something that you can attach to an existing frame. Don't know. We're going to have to wait to see what this product is when it comes out. Uh, no pricing, no information on that. So, um, notably got to,

got to note that between those two devices, it doesn't appear that Sonos and Ikea will be updating the $99 Symfonisk, oh man, Symfonisk bookshelf speaker. At the same time, it looks like they'll, they're going to keep that, they're not going to discount, they're not going to discontinue it, but they're going to keep it around and, you know, keep it, keep it the same. I don't think there's any reason to change that. It's a nice little square product, which fits in a lot with Ikea's other products. But I don't really see, like, I, I, I've had my eyes on those for a long time because right over here, you can't see them,

but right over here, uh, that way, um, I have a, an empty wall and I'd like to put, that's where I'd like to put the museum pieces, which are all over there, kind of still boxed up on, on a garage shelf. And you can't see that either. But, um, my idea was to use those symphonist bookshelf speakers as the shelving for the, uh, the, the devices that'll be up on the, on the, on the wall there and kind of have all that in the background. And it can serve as a dual purpose of, you know, playing audio in the garage. When I want some audio in here, we have, we have one play, play one out here, um, that gets used every now and then just to kind of like tie it in with the house. But I'd like to, you know, throw a couple more speakers out here and those, you know, a couple

of maybe one or two of those, uh, bookshelf speakers would fit the bill, uh, down the road. All right. Well, ADT has been hit with a class action lawsuit over a former employee that was caught accessing video feeds from hundreds of customers. In April 2020, Telespharo Aviles, I don't know how to pronounce his name, he was fired from ADT after the company learned that he had added his personal email address to customers' accounts during services, which gave him access to their systems through the company's mobile app, including the video streams of their security cameras. He pled guilty to that last month. Now in a lawsuit filed against the home security company based on, now in a lawsuit against the home security company

based on its intentional and negligent notorious app. They're basically saying they were negligent in providing these services, security services to the customer. The lawsuit targets ADT Pulse's platform as well, saying ADT failed to provide security services to its customers that it paid for by leaving large vulnerabilities in the ADT Pulse application as a result compromised the safety and security of its customers, homes, and family members. The lawsuit says ADT is responsible for seven causes of action, including negligence, intrusion upon seclusion, negligent hiring, supervision, and retention,

an intentional infliction of emotional distress, and privacy monitoring. Personally, I don't think this is going anywhere. As much as I like to bash on ADT, I mean, if you can see the graphic, you can see that I kind of making fun of them for their outrageous pricing. But, um, yeah, I, uh, I don't think this is going anywhere. First of all, I think that ADT had probably decent contracts signed, but also like it's not company practice for, uh, hopefully not company practice for a technician to put their personal

address in on customers' installs. Like, I know that this could be, I don't know, this is kind of tricky because I know that in the past I have put my company email in to maybe do like remote service monitoring or say, this happens a lot where you go out and you install a camera system. And when you're done you you really don't know how like the camera system is going to work over the next couple of days um so you kind of like you you go back and you check and you update things like the the the motion settings the zones that the motions get triggered on especially if it's like a more advanced security system a camera system and it's got motion zones,

analytics of any kind, that's kind of take more than like the hour or two that you have to set up a camera. You know, like it takes a little bit longer to do. So I wonder how that, this type of lawsuit, it's kind of scary that this kind of lawsuit like could open up integrators to that kind of thing if in fact it's company policy.

Like you may want to think about how that's done integrators, um, moving forward, I can say, I'm not doing that anymore. But, uh, if you are a security company, maybe put that in your contracts, like, Hey, we may put in a remote, it's a backdoor, right? It's a backdoor. And we may put this in to, um, update the system, uh, for vulnerabilities, you know, security updates, that kind of thing. We may, uh, may dial in and, and, and remotely monitor and check the system, make sure everything's working, all the cameras are working, that kind of thing. Um, I don't know. I know that when I was in the business, we didn't have any kind of calls like that. And it was just, it was common practice for the installer or someone

at the company to put a login in and, a login in and punch that in and go and check on the system, especially if they called in to the office with a service call. We needed to get in there and check things out. And sometimes it was only the way to do it. Greg's saying in the chat here, we create unique passwords for all clients. And in some cases we create email addresses specific for the home address. And I imagine that lets you control access to that email and, and, and, and what's being, what's being, who is able to dial in by controlling that, but still at the same time, how do you, how do you hand off, make sure you hand off the system to the client where they understand that is

specifically what is going on. I, I'm, you know, I don't, I'm not sure. I don't, I don't, I'm glad I don't have to worry too much about that anymore, but there it is. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found at, on the show notes at hometech.fm, hometech.fm slash 346. While you're there, don't forget to join us. Don't forget to check out how you can join us live in the chat room starting on Wednesday, sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. Pick of the week.

Pick of the week. I've got a good pick of the week this time. This is wild. I ran across this on Reddit, and it's an EF4 tornado going through Noonan, Georgia. Turns out from this camera, it's about 3,000, about 4,000 feet away is where the vast majority of like EF3 damage went through. It damaged the high school there. And he said, that's about 3,500 feet away to kind of give you perspective on this. And I'm going to fast forward.

This is a cool video to watch because like right here at the beginning, it has about the air sirens that are going off, the storm sirens. And then as you get like further into the video, you get into like crazy wind, rain, all sorts of insane stuff. I'm trying to fast forward. There we go. And then it gets really good like wind rain all sorts of stuff and this camera doesn't budge so it turns out uh good timing for us like

this is the unified g3 camera and uh it survived uh the power outage and everything in the neighborhood because he had it on a battery backup um and was set up good to go on that so you can see the can't the rain is really just pouring down there. So, Oh yeah, that's, that's what I was trying to get to eventually is like the rain's pouring and all of a sudden there is a tree limb that just kind of falls in front of everything and, uh, the wind and rain died down, but kind of fun to watch. And, uh, kind of interesting to see what a decent, and I will say these unified cameras are, are pretty decent. Uh,

these G3 cameras, uh, G4 is even better, but even the G3s are built hardy. And I've, I've was surprised at the quality of the video and everything that come off of them. So, um, we're going to be definitely be talking about those tomorrow, the home tech talk. So be sure to check that out. If you're, if you're a patron, you can actually go back and I usually upload the feed sometime over the weekend or on Monday. Um, so you can actually revisit the video and see what we all talked about. And of course, you can sign up there and join us too. Don't forget to join us in that. So if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for the show,

give us a shout. The email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can go to the website and fill out the form at hometech.fm slash feedback. With that, I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to a private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather

every day and talk about, well, lately we've been talking about Richard's house and, uh, and see, see everything that's been going on there. It's, it's kind of wild. He he's, he's having problems building a house and it's kind of fun watching him watching there. I don't know too much stress for me. I'm glad I don't, I'm not in that business anymore. Uh, if you want to help out the show, uh, and don't forget if you, any patron level, $1, $5, it doesn't matter. Um, gets an invite to, uh, gets unlocked on Patreon, uh, access to those home tech talks. So all the information's over there. Uh, if you want to help out the show, but can't, can't support financially, no problem.

I totally understand that. But I'd appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in a podcast app of your choice or even a little Like button here on YouTube every now and then. It doesn't hurt. It helps people find the show. It does a little bit of marketing for us and everything. So with that, I think it wraps up another week in home technology news. I want to thank everybody for joining us live.

It's always fun to do this live thing. I'm trying it out. It seems to be going better. I'm getting better at the – well, this week I spent a little bit of time working on some of the audio technology where I can actually hear what was going on. I've got some nice headphones now and help out, but I don't know. It's, it's been a long time coming and, uh, now I'm just trying to figure out how to get like all the triggers and everything set for like the sound and all that good stuff. So eventually I'll have this all figured out and it'll run smooth with automation, because I have it all automated, right?

And, yeah, yeah. I've got buttons in front of me. I've got lights behind me, lights in front of me, cameras in front of me. Maybe I'll do one or two more cameras. And then, of course, when I get the museum installed over here, there'll be a camera on the museum. I'll figure out if there's some way I can stream that camera

maybe 24-7 or something, put that up on the web where people can dial in to see that. That'll be fun. But with that, thanks everybody for tuning in. Appreciate it. Have a great weekend.