HomeTech.fm - Episode 510 - The 10th Annual Technology.fm Fireside Chat

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

For this year’s Fireside Chat, Adam Justice, Richard Gunther, TJ Huddleston, Gavin Campbell, and Seth Johnson sit down to chat about news and events that happened in 2024 and predictions for next year.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10th Annual Technology FM Fireside Chat. It's that time of the year where you, the listener, grab a drink, turn on the fireplace, sit back and listen to some of your favorite podcasters, reflect on 2024 and think ahead to 2025. My name is Gavin Campbell, and I'm one third of the crew at the HomeTech.fm podcast crew.

They call me the pro do-it-yourselfer, but I'm just good at faking things. However, today we have a great group of guys. They do know what they're talking about, and I'll go around the room and let them introduce themselves. So we're going to do this in alphabetical order, starting with Adam. All right. I'm Adam Justice, the CEO of GridConnect and co-host of the Smart Home Show. All right, next up, Richard. Yeah, I am Richard Gunther, and I am the other co-host of The Smart Home Show. And occasionally, I do my own podcast, Home On.

Thank you, Richard. What's up next? I'm laughing because the list wasn't in alphabetical order, but you nailed it, Gavin. Great job. Great job. I'm Seth Johnson. I am, again, one of the one third, I guess, one of the three on the HomeTech.fm podcast.

There we go. And finally, TJ. My name is TJ Huddleston. I am the other third of the HomeTech.fm podcast. I am a low voltage professional or installer in central Ohio. And I also dabble in a bunch of DIY home automation stuff. Excellent. So today we have a few segments that we'll be going over and hopefully we'll keep it under two hours for the listeners. But before we dive into 2025 and what is to come, we're going

to reflect on 2024. So first up, we're going to go through some of the biggest stories that we felt in our space for 2024. And this time we're going to go through some of the biggest stories that we felt in our space for 2024. And this time, we're going to go in reverse alphabetical order. So we're starting with TJ this time. Oh, man, we're going to start with the rants first, huh? Yes. For me, it's got to be Sonos. And my original comment in here, I won't say, but just Sonos not being what they've been in the past, right?

I mean, whenever you thought about Sonos before 2024, it was kind of that they were a premium speaker company. You paid a little bit more money for the products because they worked well, they looked nice and all that stuff. And all of that kind of just went out the door in 2024. They shipped a terrible software update that kind of destroyed the compatibility

with a lot of speakers. They released some devices that didn't really work like traditional Sonos devices. And just overall, it seems like the company is a little bit lost. So I would say that's probably my biggest story. I honestly don't think anyone will disagree with you. You stole my idea. I was going to say that for me but i have something else lined up but before we get to that i'll let seth go next well yeah i think i think that i think

that story is just going to supersede everything else because it's everyone noticed right everyone everyone from on the on the custom side you know you go to forums and you read dealers saying things like yeah i really don't know what sonos is doing over there right now. They seem to be kind of doing some weird stuff. So maybe not do that. Maybe do this. You know, you see them giving advice to other dealers and that kind of stuff. You didn't see that in the past. You haven't seen that in the past decade. And you go over to the verge. Of course, they've got plenty of coverage on, you know, how bad they face planted on the app update and then whatever the heck they're doing with the headphones. We're going to get to the headphones, I think. But yeah, I think that no, I think everyone across the tech spectrum, whether you're DIY,

whether you're just flaming stuff on Reddit, whether you're a professional installing the stuff in the field and selling it, like everyone noticed. And I don't think that, wow, just what a just utter face plant for a company to do. If I'm going to say anything other than that, like, I think kind of the biggest outside of that tech story I had was kind of like the big companies like Apple, Amazon, probably Google, too. I'll throw them in there, too. Not just being completely unprepared of what to do with this AI large language model thing that just popped onto the scene towards the end of last year. And I mean, Amazon's not even Amazon's demoed something, but it turns out they can't do it because they haven't been able to release whatever that is. Apple, same, same boat. Like they have some ideas. I can make weird pictures

of myself on my phone now, but Siri is still dumb as rocks. And Google, I think, was kind of the first to market on their, whatever they call it. And from what I understand, it might work really well, but I don't trust them. I can't trust Google because they'll just cancel that project in three or four years, and all the developers will have to switch over whatever they did. And I don't know.

Like, Google just seems like they're too much in haste to trust them too much on that. Although it's probably a pretty good ecosystem if you get everything up and going in it. But that's what I've got. Those two things, I think those are the big two stories. Sonos face planning and then the big three being kind of flat-footed on what to do with having smart AIs talk to you. Some good choices there.

Next up, Richard. So I'm going to start by disagreeing with Seth on the AI stuff for Apple. I think Apple, as Apple always does, took a measured, disciplined, and careful approach to incorporating AI into their products. It's going to take a long time to come to fruition and for it to be fully effective. But I think that they're being much more disciplined about this than everybody else is, and not just rushing out AI for the sake of AI. Now, as far as their assistant is concerned, I feel like I'm getting better answers to random questions, whereas before it would be you have to look at your phone to get the answer to that sort of thing. And that's good. But non-AI

stuff for Siri is still terrible. Yeah. You know, I posted the example about how I wanted to turn on a device on my porch called a Christmas tree. And it played a song called The Christmas Tree when I asked it to turn on the Christmas tree. I mean, it's just it's unbelievable how stupid this system continues to be. While they're focusing on doing other stuff, I hope that they also think about just generally improving Siri with or without AI. But anyway, okay, that was a rant aside because Seth already cheated and did two stories where we were supposed to come up with one. I just agreed. My top story is also agreeing with TJ. And frankly, TJ, I think you were way too nice about it. And maybe you need to be because you provide their

products to customers and don't want to turn them off that completely., the software move, what a boneheaded, stupid move to force that out. And then thankfully they at least came out and admitted that, yeah, I, you know, I, I forced them to get it out too early and we're paying the price for it now. Okay. Well, mea culpa doesn't fix things. In fact, they still haven't fixed everything. They're still in the process of trying to get things to work right again after that stupid move. And then with their product releases, and the reason they did that was to get those dumb headphones out.

We'll get to them. And then, yeah, we'll talk about those later. Yeah, we haven't got to the worst part yet. Hold on. So, you know, nobody else has said it yet in this particular episode, but I keep saying it on one of my other shows, Entertainment 2.0, minor plug there, where I just don't understand how the CEO still has a job. I feel it's completely irresponsible that the board has not ousted that CEO and found a replacement,

even if it's a temporary situation with someone internally until they can find someone appropriate for the job. It just baffles me. Yep. I heard from people that work there or through people that work there, through people that knew other people that work there that it was pretty early on that like we warned them and uh it was it was rushed out and you know you could say you could tell my my sono system today does not work like it did this time last year and that's a problem because we're trying to play christmas music around the house right and it's randomly skipping songs it's not controlling what it wants to because you have to go poke around in this app i mean that when it hits the other members of the family that's that's a problem that's a big problem it's so bad that i have to use a third party app to control my son's stuff because the third party app just works better most of the time that's that's not good it's not a place i want to be at

yeah yeah and i feel like sonos is an easy target for this one. Like we've been through three guys already and you've all chosen to rant on Sonos. So I had to come up with something a little different. My biggest thing this year to me and hate it or love it. I feel it's home assistant no no you hate it or love it i'm gonna love it but you know when when i heard paulus you know on the home on podcast you guys richard adam you were interviewing him i'm like yes smart home show on the smart sorry smart home show um i was like yes home assistant has made it you know that's when i was like yes now we, and they have a big year. Like of all the platforms, I find that they're constantly in the news. Every week we're talking about them, whether, you know, they're constantly involving there. They've updated dashboards this year. You know, my major gripe from a lot of people is that they still have a way to go, but they've released CarPlay apps. You know, they're the, the year of the voice.

Um, I don't know if it's been announced yet or it will be announced before, you know, this show gets released, but they're coming out with their own voice hardware now. You know, that's huge. You know, joining the Z-Wave Alliance. There's so much that has been going on with Home Assistant that to me, it's probably one of the biggest things we've talked about all year on our podcast. When I search, you know, our show notes, it's every week it's there and Seth doesn't update every week. It's because you talk about it every week.

That's why. Yeah, yeah. But there's also- It reminds me, I gotta do an update. Thanks for reminding me, Gavin. But there's always something to talk about with it. When I look at the other platforms, you know, maybe once a month we may touch on them,

but there's always something with the home assistant, more than one thing. And to me, I just think it was the biggest for me. Well, and it's gotten to the point on our show where DIY has definitely dwarfed the professional space. And we don't really talk about professional stuff anymore. Even during big shows like CD or Infocom, there's not really much news that comes out anymore in the professional space, and we're limited to the DIY space. And Home Assistant has the advantage where they have a bunch of open source contributors, and they're always making changes to everything. So I think

we're going to be talking about Home Assistant for the next decade, if not more, just because of how easy it is to use and access. And keep in mind, they are the number one open source project on GitHub now. So that's pretty huge. Wow, that's really cool. That's really cool. So I think, you know, I installed it and I haven't really done much with it,

but I will say I'm a little bit disappointed that they don't have integrations yet for some of the things that I use pretty regularly, like the Leviton Dec uh, Decora smart line. They have very limited support for that right now. Um, it seems like, uh, their, uh, the, their support for ring, if I have that right, doesn't

actually include camera feeds. Maybe, you know, of a way around that Gavin, but, uh,, but that kind of seemed problematic and annoying. And so I'm obviously going to have to dig into things deeper. But my initial view of it, while it found lots of devices around my home, was that, oh, it isn't doing some of the main things that I really want to do with it. Yeah, there's Home Assistant Vanilla and then there's Home Assistant with the wink-wink-nudge-nudge thing. And then that's where you get into the actual ring integrations that have been hacked or whatever, I guess. And yeah, you can get camera feeds and everything,

literally everything, alarm, all that good stuff. Is that homeassistant.io slash wink- slash wink wink is that what i'm looking for it's actually appropriately named it's actually appropriately named hacks h-a-c-s and however you get that installed i don't remember gavin walked me through it once okay and it lives in there now so yeah yeah so i'll put richard in the not love it group but it doesn't seem like you hate it as no i don't i don't and i'm pretty impressed by how powerful it group, but it doesn't seem like you hate it as you used to. No, I don't. I don't.

And I'm impressed by how powerful it is. So yeah, it, it, it certainly has some legs on it when I'm, I'm still, you know, still was talking to manufacturers this year about their integrations with control systems and writing drivers and everything. And in the past, you know, we wouldn't even mention something like a home assistant, but that's kind of where they're starting at. Right. And like TJ was saying, there's really

been not much news outside of mergers and acquisitions from the pro space. It's just been kind of a innovation, less space for, I don't, it's been a number. I can't think of anything for the past 10 years. It's really been like a revolutionary new product that has come onto the scene. They've all kind of settled in their ways. And when the DIY space started kicking off with Amazon and Apple, they said, oh yeah, let's, that's cute. That's a cute toy. We'll, we'll get into it. And now they may find themselves a little bit behind and they're, they're using some of those products like Amazon and Apple, Siri for integrating and doing integrations now, finally. But, I mean, finally. I mean, it's only been five or six years since that should have happened.

It's just been a very nothing happening over in the CDR world. It's been kind of sad. Maybe 2025 something will come up. Tiny little speakers that we saw last year. Those were cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's all the professional space has.

They have video displays and they have speakers and occasionally they'll have smart games. New remotes that get sued. Yeah. Remotes too. Yeah. So that wraps up my pick. So we're going to wrap it up with Adam's pick now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that wraps up my pick. So we're going to wrap it up with Adam's pick now.

Yeah. So my pick, I feel like, uh, you know, this could be the pick for the last, I don't know, two, three years, but, uh, you know, for me, it's all about matter and, um, both in a good way because it's moving forward, but also in a bad way that like, it still is not living up to what I think. I don't know. Maybe we all, you know, thought it was going to be too amazing and hyped it up too much layer to solve, you know, some of the integration stuff. And it's good to see that home assistant and other platforms are tightly integrating with it and figuring out a way to work with that and other means, but it's still very much not there and still has some, some work to go. And I won't name names, but somebody who's done a lot of work and was kind of an early, you know, very early into matter basically said to me at CES last year, you know, how

he kind of regretted being so early. You know, the first guy through always has all the arrows in his back. And and that's definitely how they felt. And, you know, just stuff about how, you know, things weren't working the way they expected. You know, it was a huge lift to get there. And I feel like I learned that lesson for us in the early days of HomeKit. I was just going to say that, Adam. Yeah. So, so we were a little bit more measured in our, um, jumping into the matter pool. Um, we did our first product for, uh, for a customer on matter that should be shipping soon. Um, so,

um, but, uh, but yeah, I, I feel like I learned that lesson the hard way and it, it sucks to see that's still going on. But I think it'll get there eventually. I guess I have a question on that because I hear people say that. And I guess I just don't know because I don't really have very much opportunity to use Matter product, right? I think I have an Eve door sensor that I converted to Matter at some point. And that's literally it. And it works. Like I saw my daughter's door closed a few seconds ago

for her to go to bed and open back up like five seconds later. I get those notifications every single night. It works fine. What, from a manufacturer standpoint, like what does, from a consumer standpoint, I hear people griping and complaining about Matter. And generally it's about like,

oh, it doesn't have this feature. It doesn't have vacuum bots or whatever. It doesn't have washers and complaining about matter. And generally it's about like, oh, it doesn't have this feature. It doesn't have vacuum bots or whatever. It doesn't have washers and not dryers. And like, it all has some like esoteric feature that they're missing. But like, is it down? Like, what does matter truly missing from a manufacturer standpoint that,

like, is it reliability? Like, what are they missing? Yeah, I mean, probably. I mean, I think it's all the devil's in the details. And so it's things like, I mean, probably. I mean, I think it's all the devil's in the details. And so it's things like, you know, Richard talked recently about his new Nest thermostat and kind of all the hoops you had to jump through to get that onto HomeKit. Yes, you can do that, but like, I think the kind of ease of hopping between ecosystems and the interconnectivity of everything, you know, some of the tech requirements. I know like on Apple platforms up until recently, you had to have a Matter Hub of some sort, like a HomePod, you know, to be the central hub. I think that changed in 18, one of the iOS 18s. But so, yeah, so we literally had that, you know,

that conversation with a client like in the last month where they were like, oh, but I heard you have to have a hub. And I'm like, not anymore. It's like, so I think, you know, for this stuff to live up to its promise, kind of like somebody else said about when it goes to the other members of the household like if it's not even ready for us then it ain't ready for the other members of the household yet and so i i still think we have a long way to go before it's easy for normal people to be able to do something as simple as install a nest thermostat and have it talk to

home kit. And just from my point of view, my experience, like when it comes to matter, the marketing material checks all the boxes, you know, they say all the right things that you want to say, but I'm seeing a lot of things come into play that I was predicting. Once you get all those big people involved, they're going to want their way to track things. Yes, there's some local control, but it's still going to be feeding information back to them for tracking and stuff like that. And from a technological point of view, I found Matter came with the same set of problems that, you know, it's just a new platform. Like my devices were still dropping off. How do I fix them?

Well, I reboot my Apple TV. Sometimes they come back on online again right um so it's it's not like they've solved all that problems they've just moved the same problems to a new ecosystem or a new platform and i'm still seeing them and i think some of the problem too is like you have all these giants and they have to agree on how things are going to move forward which just takes a lot of time. So I think some of the progress has been slowed by just, you know, when you have to have Apple, Google like nobody wants something that's their special proprietary thing to be in the standard because that's the differentiation that you know allows them to sell their devices for a premium so it's kind of this give and take of like you want to put

in the bare minimum to get compatibility but you also want to leave stuff on the table so that you can provide your special experience and get your recurring revenue subscription model to take off. Yeah. So I've heard one word that Gavin used, it just kind of like tripped me up. It was like, from a technical point of view. And from the very beginning, Matter never struck me as a technical product. It's always like, we were talking about this in the hub the other day, Matter's more like a sales tool, right? Like it's the, we had 10 stickers on the boxes saying it works with everything.

And now we've been able to scrape that off and put like one Matter, one, it's Matter compatible and a barcode on it. And you should be in theory, good to go to hook it up to all the- But it's gotta work. Oh, I get it. I get that.

I understand that. But that's, that was their goal from the beginning. It wasn't. Honestly, if you go back and look at the Apple press release, it wasn't talking about making it work. It was talking about simplifying it for consumers to buy stuff. Making it easier. Yeah. So if that's the goal, then, I mean, I don't know.

We're a bunch of tech people walking around. And it seems to me like the goal from it from day one has been to scrape those stickers off the box, lessen the confusion at the store so that they can walk out of Best Buy with the product in hand and know that it works with whatever ecosystem they're in. And from that point of view, Adam, I think you mentioned this, it seems like it's the best shot at doing that so far. I think you said that at the beginning i i kind of agree with that i guess like i i don't know how well it works right because i like i said it works fine for me but that's just for me gavin has had issues dj's had issues i i but i i don't know like where where where it goes in the future i mean we're we're very early days like and you're attesting to that from a manufacturer's standpoint, it's on 1.4 right now. And maybe by matter 2.0,

it'll be the basics will be rock solid. I don't know. I hope so. Yeah. I'm still happy. They, they did it, I guess.

Like I'm happy. It's, it's a project that they're interested in. As I said to the undamed manufacturer, the only way out is through oh boy so on that note we're gonna go into our favorite products in 2024 we're just gonna go over you know what we enjoyed what we liked um and this time uh i'm gonna do this from tallest to shortest. Now, this may get me in trouble because this is what I remember from you guys. It'd be between you and Adam for tallest.

Yeah, well, hey, I'm going to guess here. I'm going to guess here. So, let's see if I got it right. I started with Adam. I think you're the tallest here. I'll let you go first. I think you're probably right. Yes.

Okay. probably right yes okay um so my favorite product was uh something that was a recommendation by our friend uh jennifer tui from uh the verge and i was really ticked off because i pre-ordered this um and then like missed the email when the first wave came out. And so then I had to like re pre-order it. Um, and it is the skylight calendar max. Um, so if you're not familiar with skylight, yeah, I think they probably started as a smart photo frame company. Um, and then they did this smaller version of their calendar product. And, um, and then this jumbo one, which is basically like a, I don't know, 30 inch TV, uh, uh, tilted on its side, or you can mount it either way. Um, so I have three kids and, and, you know, I'm married and we're a busy family, you know,

kids from age seven to 14 and, um, you know, lots going on in our family. So the promise of this was, and years ago, we went to, you know, a Google calendar for every member of the family and managing, you know, who's driving who to what, you know, like a business would. So this became kind of the tool for letting the kids know, like, what's going on today and what are we doing and i would say this this uh settled into our household uh quite well uh out the gate uh it's something that people comment on when they come into the house and and notice and everybody's really liked it um and you know checks boxes for all all members of the household um so yeah it's been a great addition and definitely

something i would recommend uh listeners who have busy families check out still backordered unfortunately yeah because i've been looking for some kind of calendar thing to mount on the wall and i've thought about doing just some kind of like digital display you know because you could build all kinds of stuff with yo deck or or or whatever digital signup solution there is out there but i'm more of a plug and play kind of guy so i might yeah they definitely do the plug and play thing well it's got a nice app and and kind of once you sync all of your main calendars and things to it it works really well and they just added a cool new feature um for anybody that has little kids and you've ever done like sticker charts of like, you know, if you brush your teeth 10 times,

then you get a coloring book or whatever. It's like they basically kind of built that sort of functionality into it. So it seems like they have a really good understanding of their core audience and are building, you know, great features for that type of family. Hmm. Is there any reoccurring subscription to this?

Yes. Of course they offer one. Yeah, I think it came with the year. $39 annually. That's not bad. Yeah. Yeah, it gives you a discount if you buy with a subscription for the first year, which is kind of nice.

Then it looks like it's, what, $40 a year afterwards. So that's not too bad. But that's optional. It doesn't look like you need that for calendar syncing it's just if you want to do other stuff like meal planning and um photos and things like that did you get that adam did you get the plan i did and um you know i would say we're still primarily using it for um just the calendar stuff but i think we have aspirations to dig in further and and do some of the other features as well. Trying to remember, I use something very similar to this just to combine

a couple of calendars together and show them on a TV every morning. Although the TV died and I haven't replaced it yet. So I guess technically I'm not doing that still and I'm still paying for this. So yay for me. But it's not a, well, i guess it's kind of a diy thing where i kind of have to put stuff together like check off what calendars i want to show on this digital signage thing and it shows it every morning just fine with like a radar with the weather and all that good stuff and then also pulls from like google photos to rotate pictures around so it's a really nice thing to have kind of up in the morning we can kind of like see what we're doing but this looks like it's adds the extra stuff of being like right interactive right on it right so it's it's a really nice thing to have kind of up in the morning we can kind of like see what we're doing but this looks like it's adds the extra stuff of being like right

interactive right on it right so it's like yeah it's it's a full touch screen and yeah so the kids um definitely are always looking at it looking at what's going on checking out what's going on in the week so well and i don't have any kids but the sticker chart sounds exciting for my use case. I'm going to get myself stickers. You get a gold star, TJ. Nice. I really, yeah, I looked at this and I really liked something like,

I wish I could have something like this. The main problem I have is I want it for my work calendar. Right. And the work for obviously reasons, lock it down. So I can't sync it to this. Right. Yeah.

But you know, keeping an eye on my work calendar, like I have so many meetings a day. This would be great if they allowed me to. But it's a good pick still. And I know a few families I'd recommend this to. Yep. All right. So next up, next tallest, I guess would have been me.

That's my guess. I'm going with it. But my choice for my favorite product in 2024, it's more of the technology, the millimeter wave technology. And I've gotten a few of these sensors in. And to be honest, when it came to room presence, they totally changed the game. Like before you had the PIR that would sense movement. But if you were sitting still, they would turn off and you were waving your hands and doing stuff like that. What the millimeter wave no longer had to deal with that.

It sends you, even when you were sitting still on the toilet for the hour, playing a game, you know, I really liked it. And if I had to choose a specific product, it would be the two, two,

yeah. Battery powered millimeter wave sensor. And this one had both the PIR and the millimeter wave. And why I liked that one, because it was one of the first ones with battery right that allowed me to to use it in places where i don't have a plug to plug it in so like in the bathroom um it's great for those low um you know where you don't have a lot of people coming through it so you don't kill the battery but it uses the pir to sense you know everybody at first and as soon as the pir stops sensing people then the

millimeter wave kicks in and it works really well like even when you're in the shower the light will still stay on and everything like that too so i've it's changed how i use that stuff um and i'm really happy with the millimeter wave technology and the added bonus is because it's made by tuya the chinese government knows when you're in the shower oh it's oh wait wait it's zigbee so it's all local oh i'm not worried about that it's a zigbee product so i'm happy with it he encouraged that anyway it's all right and yeah i don't care if they know anyway we found out he has a camera in there in the last show you gotta pay a monthly fee for that that's where gas comes in gavin has a service that's you get that as part of it it's kind of like amazon prime where you just get the video nobody really uses the video can we opt out of that part this is going downhill quickly i'm

trying to keep this under control all right next up Next up in the list. I thought Richard, you were the next tallest. That's my guess. All right. I'll take it. So my top pick is a smart kitchen product. And this isn't new in 2024. It came out last year, but I am so excited about this product. I received to review a mill food waste dehydrator. And this is something that's about the size of a trash can. You would put it in your kitchen and you put food scraps in it. And instead of trying to, um, you know, break down food and with enzymes and that whole chemical process, this actually just dries the scraps and grinds them into little bits that you can then take and use as fertilizer or whatever. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And more importantly, my partner really liked it as well.

It solved a problem for us where before we would take food and if we had anything substantive, we'd actually throw it in the freezer so that when we put it in the trash to go out on trash day, it wouldn't smell. It wouldn't attract animals or anything like that to the trash can. So this is a much more responsible way of getting rid of food waste. It's not good to put this stuff in your garbage because it just ends up breaking down when it's in landfill and that creates methane and it's just all bad. So a really cool product. It's not cheap. It's an expensive product. If you purchase it, it costs about a thousand dollars, but you have options for that. You can do a rent to own program where you pay about three something a year, or you could do a program where you just keep on renting it and you get all of the services with it. They have a great app that tells you what you can and can't put in it. And you can pretty much put anything in it that's food, including bones and stuff like that, as long as you're not putting like, you know, the ham hock thing in there. And it just does a great job with this stuff.

I liked it so much that I ended up buying it at the end of my review period. So I kept the thing and I'm loving it. And anybody that's interested in it will find on our website, the episode where I reviewed this, a discount code where you can get, I believe, $100 or $200 off your either first rental or the purchase price if you're interested in something like this. So I cannot recommend this product enough. And everybody that I know that's reviewed it has ended up buying one. See, this is the type of thing I think of when somebody says a smart appliance, right? I don't really think of a smart fridge or a smart oven because those seem

useless to me. But something like this actually seems like it would be useful and that most people would actually be able to utilize. Yeah, it is connected. It lets me know when it's full and it needs to be emptied. It lets me know when the filter needs to be replaced. Useful things like that as opposed to superfluous stuff. Yeah, I saw this and I thought it was brilliant. I really wanted to get one, but that price though, like you said, it is expensive. It is cheap. I may look at it again in the new year, but it's a great pick. Yeah, I think this would be a purchase for me if we didn't have a yard that we just have a

compost bin in. But I think this is a good option. I would consider this if we didn't have a compost bin we just have a compost bin in uh but i i think this is a good option i would consider this if we didn't have a compost bin for sure that's pretty cool so great pick richard um okay the next two for tallest uh it was a toss-up but i'm gonna go with seth i've never even if if you had said rate rate us from highest height i'd be like adam's tall gavin's tall richard i don't really know. Wait till you get to the next one. Wait for the next one. Next time we're all together, we're going to have to line up.

Yeah. I'm going to write down... I wrote down ESP32. I've been thinking about it today, trying to figure out what my favorite product this year was. And I really enjoyed not so much tinkering with these little boards, but kind of enjoyed the integration. Can you explain what that is? Oh, so ESP32, Espressif is the company. They make this board called a chip called ESP32s.

And that is literally the chip that's powering all of the IoT devices out there right now. It's kind of unbelievable i i every shelly device has got one in it every i've got i've got devices in here i think there's a sensible that may be an esp32 i've got devices that i didn't even think were esp32 powered and and you you power them up and then they show up on the network as expressive and like oh okay they're using an esp32 all of our stuff yeah yeah it's a great little product um and i haven't even like i said i haven't gotten to the point where i'm tinkering with them they're just so versatile and what you can do the apollo guys have you know we have the

little christmas trees that that that we got from them um actually ordered from them but like that's an esp32 like and everything that they have is ESP32. But what I enjoy most about them is that the endless amount of IoT devices out there that are powered by this product and how much benefit that I get from low power little sensor things and being able to expand usage in my house without going like going crazy.

And now I'm already thinking like where I can use them as a tinkerer around the house to like add a contact in or add you know something in just plug it in and you're done i've got my entire like just about my entire outdoor lights powered with expressive you know esp32s running wled and it works great like it's there there's a there's a great community of developments around it and it's pretty amazing what people have been able to do

with the little tiny chip. That's been my favorite product this year. Just a little more tinkering on the hardware level towards the end of the year here and I've really, really liked it. There's another couple of companies that have, LilyGo has been a little bit separate of a company that does like

the mesh tastic stuff but the the esp32s have been had more benefit this year um using and what i like about the esp32s is you can easily integrate them into home assistant through esp home right and that takes away a lot of the programming like you just edit some yaml and all of a sudden the sensor gets exposed so it's really fun when you want to create something that's not really out there, but you want to create it for yourself. That's what they're good for. Yeah. I think next year we're probably going to see more ESP home or ESP 32 companies, whatever

you want to call them, uh, just because they're, they're so cheap for the chips. I mean, you as a consumer can go onto eBay or AliExpress or whatever it is and order a half dozen of these boards for what, $10 or even less than that, depending on how basic you want to get with them. So I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that. It might end up dwarfing like ZigBee and Z-Wave and stuff like that just because of how accessible it is to the average person. I won't say it would do that because like it's all Wi-Fi based. So like every time I add what it is on, I'm clogging up my Wi-Fi with, you know, Wi-Fi node and hoping that the antenna is not screwing something up. And luckily I have decent access points in here and I don't have

to worry too much about it, but there have been a couple of like, I have realized that some of the outdoor lighting, like I'm going to have to get a hardware too, because it's, it's, I could put an antenna on it, but I want to start doing like streaming DMX code to it. I'm not going to be able to do that over. I mean, I can't do it over Wi-Fi, but I don't want to, I don't want to clog up my Wi-Fi with it. So, um, again, it's versatile enough. I can, I can do that. I actually have two or three of them coming in that will have that like a little hat on top of it that has a ethernet connector so it's been a it's been a fun tinkerers project type thing and and like like i said manufacturers like adam said the manufacturers use it in just about everything these days you'd be surprised you'd be really surprised how many devices actually are using expressive under the hood we'll do our best to not dive heavily into politics, but I do think that's one of my concerns under our new administration in the U.S. is that that could become a problem. While Espressif is Chinese-based, they've actually

moved a lot of their company to Taiwan for various reasons. And so hopefully they can maybe dodge some of that. But we've worked with them since super early days. We were one of their first distributors in the US. And we've been all in on them from a Wi-Fi chipset standpoint for quite some time now. So yeah, I agree with everything you guys said. It's a great platform, great engineers. Actually, some of the engineers we worked with at Marvell, who was kind of our main partner in the early days of HomeKit, we tried to hire them and they ended up going to work for Espressif. So, you know, we know the team there really well and really smart and talented guys so um uh yeah so we'll see where it goes but but i'm hopeful that

it it doesn't get uh messed up in in some of where politics go there is a funny there's a funny post over on uh firewalla had a kind of a beta introductory product come out they're they're going to start looks like they're getting into access points. And it's a straight like pull from China type company. And every, he's like, what is the pricing going to be? I'll let you know after 1-20-25. Everything was after 1-20-25. It was such a funny, like, he's like, I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be. The tariffs are going to make the price higher or lower. I have no idea if we're even going to be involved in the tariff. So like, it's going to, it's all up in the air. We'll see what happens. It'll be anywhere from 9999 to $1,000.

Yeah, exactly. Nothing money can't solve. Another good pick. All right. The shortest of the group, TJ. I think I am the shortest of the group, but I'm fine with that. There's nothing wrong with that.

My favorite product of 2024 is continuing the appliance trend, but a different kind of appliance. Mine is the Litter Robot 4. And this is a automated litter box. So if you have a cat or multiple cats like I do, one of the things we had to do all the time was scoop the litter like every two days. And we would have two litter boxes throughout the house. We'd scoop the litter every two days and have to deal with that and have to refill and all that stuff. And when we bought our house last year for Christmas time, I convinced the spouse that we should buy this litter robot for because I was tired of dealing with cat litter.

And it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. It's not one of the cheapest. It was $900. It came with like a three or four year warranty with it. But it just works. It's one of those appliances that I don't really touch it. I clean it like every three months or something like that. I add litter to it and I empty the little compartment where all the waste goes at the bottom. And that's it. And initially I was all excited because I was like, man, I can hook this up to Home Assistant. And I can do all kinds of fun things with it. But I don't. All I do is Home Assistant, like every five cleans, it triggers the robot vacuum to go clean the room

that the litter robots in. And that's it. Because I don't have to do anything else with it. It just continues to work. And it tells me whenever it gets 75% of the way full, it says, hey, you need to change the litter box. Or it says, Hey, you need to add litter. And that's it. So that is my favorite product of 2024. I would highly recommend it. Definitely not a cheap purchase, but if you have cats, I think it's well worth it. I remember when you got this and you talked very highly of it and where I was looking at various, um, litter boxes out there. So my advice to somebody is don't get the cheap ones because there's articles of them killing animals out there too spend the money

and get the good one that's you know has all the sensors and everything in it well and this one yes that is a problem with some cheaper um models that you find on the internet um what i like about this one is that one, this one should not have the issue because this one, it stays open the whole time, right? And so basically, it's just a it's a really genius design. And I think it'll last a long time. Because it's literally just a giant globe that just rotates. And that's it. That's all it does. It just rotates one way or the other. And so there's always an opening and it has safety sensors in there to where if a cat is in there or if a cat comes back in it should stop spinning automatically but hypothetically

even if those sensors failed the cat could still get out because it can never fully close depends on how much you like cats maybe that's a feature yeah well i feel like you're not gonna buy a 900 winner box dude on that note geez wow it got dark okay well moving on in 2023 we made some predictions for 2024 and now we're gonna go through how did we do so for this section i i just want you to go through the prediction you made and then cover you know what you saw come out this year. And the order I chose from this is probably going to get me in some trouble, but I'm doing it anyway. Right.

So I was only sure about one person in this list, but I'm going from youngest to oldest at this point. Wow. Right. So starting with youngest, and I've guessed on a lot of these. So I'm going to go withj as the youngest why don't you start no so we say in our prediction and then talking about it yeah say your prediction and then talk about what what came out it did was were you right can you tell me how you how like where you got the monkey paw you wished on this prediction for oh man what did you do here yeah so so yeah i don't know uh my my prediction for 2024 was sonos headphones

and you know i was correct i think i'm am i the only one on this list that is correct here no uh okay you nailed it but what did it cost you so uh yeah this is where sonos just, they sh** the bed. This is what I originally wanted to say earlier. Now you have a new tag. Yeah, it happens. So this was my biggest gripe. It wasn't even the Sonos update that made my stuff not work correctly

because it still doesn't work correctly all the time. But the biggest story for me was the Sonos headphones, right? Because whenever you thought the Sonos headphones, right? Because whenever you thought about Sonos, you thought about products that work together, right? It was kind of the Apple of the audio world where you bought a new Sonos speaker and you plugged it in and you could group it with the other Sonos speakers and use it the exact same way. And several years ago, roughly around COVID, they introduced the S1, S2 transition, which eliminated a lot of devices from working together.

And that was kind of the first fragmentation of the Sonos ecosystem. This is the next fragmentation of the Sonos ecosystem, though, because they released a product that doesn't work like any of their other products. They released Sonos headphones, which are great Bluetooth headphones. If you read the reviews on them, they are amazing headphones. I purchased them to try them. They were really good quality.

I thought they had some really good features on them and everything, but they didn't work as a Sonos zone. They only worked with one soundbar upon launch, and they only worked with the $800 soundbar. And eventually they released compatibility with the Sonos Beam, and I believe now the Sonos Ray. But you can't use them as a Sonos zone like you can every other speaker in the Sonos ecosystem. And so, yes, we got the Sonos

headphones, but at what cost? Did you buy one? I did and I returned it because it's just, it's one of those things I wanted Sonos headphones because I wanted headphones that worked as a Sonos zone. And the reason for that, even though Seth likes to laugh, is because I want to walk around and listen to my TV through headphones. And we already have this. We already have TV headphones. I used to make a lot of money down in Florida selling TV headphones to old people all the time. And so the Sonos headphones was not a far-fetched idea. It just was poorly implemented.

And because of it, we got this half-rush software update that screwed everything else up because they had to try to sell $500 headphones that nobody's buying. So it really came full circle with just destroying the Sonos brand, in my opinion. And the frustrating thing is that they already had the technology in-house from the Roam speaker, where you could both use Bluetooth and use the device as an endpoint for Sonos. So why they didn't just adopt that to the headphones instead of this ridiculous model where it had to pair with a soundbar, I will never understand. I still don't know why they can't make your iPhone or Android phone a zone and like pipe music to that and just have pipes the music from that to your headphones, whatever headphones you have have whether they be sonos whether they be airpods or whatever i don't i don't get it well they're resisting being an aggregating music app because you already have the music app on your device or the or the music service on your device and and there could be licensing

it could be licensing yeah issues associated with that too well the the other thing i want to point out too out too, which I've never seen anybody write about this, but I find this fascinating. The other part of the fragmentation with Sonos is that Sonos has their own streaming audio service called Sonos Radio. You want to know what's hilarious about Sonos Radio? You can't use the Sonos headphones. I've never seen anybody point this out, but it makes no sense to me. How? Why? So the only way you can use Sonos radio with your Sonos headphones is if you listen on your $900 or $500 soundbar and then pipe it to your headphones at the same time. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, so, but yeah, they only lost 53 million. It looks like last last three months. So perfect. Yeah. Well, I have a feeling that Patrick Spence has gone after the holidays. We have a friendly wager going on over at the podcast. But I'm pretty sure they're waiting until after the holidays to fire him. So I'm hoping. Santa's gift to me, please. That's all I asked for. My wife said she couldn't make it happen.

At least after the bonuses. You know, he's got to get a bonus, right? Are they doing the bonuses? Does he? I mean, they said they were going to put it on hold until everything was great. And I think they're assuming everything is great right now. Well, they also said they're going to stop releasing products until everything was fantastic. And then like two months later, they released products.

So I don't think they really know what's going on over there. They're going to make you buy the version two of the headphones. They're going to add the features you want just the way it will cost you more money. That's right. And a subscription. They'll put a subscription on it too, just for good measure. There you go. All right, Adam, you weren't here.

You didn't do it last year, did you? No, I missed last year. So I was right in my prediction. All right. So you got it right. So there's one check right there. So skipping Adam, we're going to go on to Seth. Adam is younger than I am.

That's what I found out today. These are guesses. These are guesses. Yeah, I don't know. It would be a good guess as far as I'm concerned. Everybody say their birthdays and social security numbers on the air so you know. I guessed in the pro space there would be some reconciliation over with DIY products. They would start integrating a little bit more and pulling things in, pulling the walled gardens down.

I really can't say anything like that happened. I mean, I feel like I did kind of rant on this earlier. The pro space has been pretty stagnant. Like, we have new speakers yay new transducers wow um new tv panels that come out every year every six months i mean who cares like i mean that's great they look awesome i i really appreciate it but there's been no drum beat or nothing moving that direction control four and did announce they were going to with a new platform and new versioning and stuff

that's coming may come out this next year i'm not even sure i think they called it x4 that they would have like a native home kit integration i think kind of like what you would see with home bridge something along those matters so the the the products that could get pushed out to to home kit like shades and lights and that kind of stuff would get pushed out and and exist as little widgets and that's great um did it happen it's coming that's one of those like they announced it and i it's really weird because they usually don't do that they usually i think elon released a new interface and control four had to save us too uh but because because elon's interface looked really nice uh they also control 4 also had like i see what you did there nice yeah

control 4 also had a like early i mean way way late last year or the year before 2023 um they had some like uh rumblings about moving to Zigbee 3.0, which would have been great because then you could have any kind of Zigbee 3.0 device and just pop it onto the system. Wow. That's only eight years late. Yeah, I know.

Well, they're still using Zigbee. It's professional. What do you expect? Yeah. They're still using Zigbee, what, HA or,

they have their own like Zigbee stack that they've been using for forever and you know they they're running their products through it and have their own specialized stuff now i see in some of the later software that they're releasing like it says zigbee legacy or something like that zigbee pro legacy or something so it looks like they're finally heading that direction i have a feeling that the acquisition that went on with that company or with their parent company uh kind of slowed all of that process down, which is understandable. But I'd really like to see the ability to integrate more products with these big systems. It'd be nice.

Rather than having them live in their little small walled gardens of, I mean, granted, the products they have work really nice within those walled gardens. But it's a bigger world out there and it would be nice to use any of LA switches in my control four system. That'd be great, but I can't right now. I'd say the only rebuttal I have to that is if you take a look at it as like the, the expressive approach, some professional manufacturers have started using DIY products, like you mentioned, like home assistant, uh, home assistants being used in Josh AI. It's also being used in a company called Innovo to bring home assistant devices to a lawn. Um, so there's, there's rumblings there, but it's not coming from the manufacturers themselves. It's coming from third party support, but there is a lot of ways to bring these DIY products into the professional systems now, depending on what they are. And

obviously certain platforms like that, like Josh, they don't allow you to do whatever you want. So they only support certain things through Home Assistant, but that's kind of the approach they've taken for them. Yeah. There are third-party driver developers like Alan Chow, who has a, like he has released a HomeKit, or no, sorry, home assistant driver for control for where you can push the devices. I think I think it's push devices from control for out to home assistant or vice versa. Maybe it's vice versa. But that's that's a really cool product. Like and it exists. And it's the third partyparty developers that have always traditionally pushed that forward. But it's really much better if it's a first-party thing, especially with something as simple or as logical as having ZigBee 3 or whatever. I know that's a big statement.

Upgrading or changing out or planning, however, all of those devices change from ZigB Pro over to Zigbee 3.0 is probably a massive undertaking behind the scenes because all of the junk that Gavin talks about and having to deal with when it comes to Zigbee or Z-Wave, you do not see that in Control 4. You literally just tap the device four times and it's working or it's not. And that's all we have to worry about. So if they've got to, they've got to make that process that simple for their dealers before they can roll something like that out.

And yeah, it's got to be a massive thing. And keep in mind the problems I see, like on the pro space, you don't want to be running into those problems either, right? Because- That's money. Yeah. You have more problems, it costs you more money. So they got to make sure it works. It's very reliable before they implement it. So maybe keeping it locked down on their end is probably better for them, right? I think it has been.

I think traditionally it has been. I think, but now it's kind of like, they can still have their own hardware that is best in class, right? And, but at least give us the option to integrate with the stuff that's on the market like hue and um in a valley and all that stuff you know yeah well good big um up next is myself and last year i made two predictions first one i said there'd be some activity in the remote space since at that time i thought harmony was actually gonna be shutting down everything but since then i've learned they were going to keep the server still.

They were just stopping to make the hardware. So everything's still running. So I just expected to be some movement in the remote space. And there kind of was. We saw some remotes get released. I believe Flirk was one company. And SwitchBot released a remote that I saw some good reviews about. But it wasn't like the remote that I saw some good reviews about, but it wasn't like

the movement that I was expecting. I think there's still a lot of room for them to catch up to where harmony was. So I'm still expecting some more in that space to happen. But the other prediction I made was I was expecting a home assistant come out with some voice assistant software hardware. And yes, that's coming uh december 19th they're announcing it so i got that one right and i'm proud of it wait wait wait you're announcing in advance that you got it right i mean yes what if nailed it it doesn't happen insider information huh well if it doesn't happen paulus and the team have a lot more problems than i do if it doesn't happen because they've actually come out and said on the 19th they're releasing, they're announcing it.

Okay. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is next year, though. You said it was going to be this year. No, no. The 19th of December. Oh, 19th.

Does the announcement count? Because is it going to be released this year or is it going to be released next year? Are you guys trying to take away my point here? No, no. I've heard that some of their partners already have the product in hand and they're using it. I've seen it. Yes. I've seen the hardware is there.

I don't know when they'll actually start selling, but the announcements on the 19th. I am looking forward to this. We use Google in our house and it's just awful at this point. I tried to go to Alexa and I thought that was awful as well. So I'm hoping that Home Assistant voice is just something that's like super easy to use and it just does the basic stuff. I just need it to turn

on and off stuff. That's it. You have high hopes. The bar is really low. Nobody said Home Assistant easy to use in the same sentence, did they? Yeah, I mean... I'm assuming I won't have to touch YAML at least. i don't know one of the things i'm excited though they do allow it to tie into like um chat gpt or something like that so um you'll get a lot more power or you know you won't it won't be like prompt like how alexa is today um i'm looking for it i want to see where it goes with that oh look another update

just do it i want to go back to your i want to go back to your comments about remotes for a minute because i still think there's a huge void in the market for this um and i don't i haven't seen anything from anybody that um really does what what harmony could do at the level of quality and the ease of use um and certainly not something i would you know recommend to any of my like super not techie um you know friends and family and things like that and like i wish i don't know i wish we could get in there uh or you easy enough, but Harmony was such a mess. And from what I understood, it was just such a house of cards that they were going to have to rewrite from scratch anyway. So given the amount of rework that was going to need to be done to save it, like it just wasn't worth saving.

I forget. I knew somebody at Logitech and I forget what it was all built on, but it was like super old tech. And like, uh, I can understand why they had to go there, but, uh,

yeah, hopefully at some point somebody will figure something like this out. Cause I don't feel like there's any great options that are super diy friendly yeah i i have my doubts that anybody can make the remote space work because if logitech who's king of 20 mice can't make the remote work i just don't see the third party support for that i think it's going to be a professional based product for the longest time we're going to see we've seen a couple random remotes come out i think the the was the flirk uh urb usb remote came out this year the switchbot remote came out this year so we'll see like rumblings of it um yeah but i think it's gonna be one of those spaces most people just

use hdmi cec nowadays and and that's it so i was just gonna say for simple setups, well, like, uh, you know, what we did in my basement for the bar of, uh, a Sonos soundbar and Apple TV and a TV, H HDMI CEC, and that simple Apple TV remote works lovely. Um, but I think once you start to get, you know, uh, a receiver and some other pieces in the mix, it's, it's trouble. Yeah. And I'm the type of person where i want all the buttons on the remote right like and people keep telling me the trend is they're moving towards less buttons on the remote like an apple remote well i have to put up with my neighbor who's just

got new bell boxes and stuff and he's using the bell app with the apple remote and trying to jump around channels is near impossible for him right because he doesn't have numbers to type in the channels and he has like 3 000 channels on there so he's got page up and page down to get to where he wants to go so i i agree there's a gap and i i think we need to you know introduce remotes with more buttons not these less button remotes it's. It's a very hard problem. I mean, there are remote companies that made bad remotes. So it's a very hard problem to solve for just the physical part of it alone.

And I don't envy anyone who gets into that and tries to do it because it's, it's a beast. And there's so many different ways that, uh, things that control these days and that remotes can mess up. But I think, I think that like outside of the seat, like when, like Adam said, once you get a receiver,

like once you get like three devices and one of them is a receiver, it's generally best to have a, a universal remote of some type. I, I, and I wish there was something out there that could take the place of the Harmy and could do as much as it could. It's disappointing to hear that they were,

like you said, a house of cards. I didn't know that. I didn't know that story. That's a new story, Adam. That doesn't surprise me. I mean, if their front-end experience was any indication of what their back end systems were like well their software was good because you could use it but it was bad because of everything else

it did i mean it was it was i thought it was terrible software quite frankly but i agree with you it was bad software but i got my head around it and found out, eventually you figure it out and it gets the job done. And I think I'm still logged in to my Harmony remote account on this tablet. And if I ever get logged out or this tablet dies, I'm kind of screwed because I don't remember the password and I no longer have the email associated with that account. Oh boy. Yeah.

I wish I would have bought, I wish I would have bought like a thousand of their remotes before they stopped making them and just like held onto them for five years. And then, you know, Sold them to Gavin. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting story. I don't know if you remember the add-on remote that they came out with, which allowed you to add a second remote to your Harmony household, even just working on the same TV. And that was a nice situation for multi-person households. I bought one and liked it so much that when they discontinued that remote,

I bought three of them. So I have backups and you can use that as your primary remote as well. And I've done that in a couple of cases, but the only place that I'm using Harmony right now is at the rental property. Again, to make things easy for people. And at home, it's just the Apple remote. Like you, I bought backups as well. So you're not alone. I have a few in the basement just sitting there in case one breaks. Yep.

I'm looking around for that Fleer remote that I have. I don't even know where it is. It's on my desk or it's disappeared somewhere, but it's not. It was never, I don't know if they've even advanced the software on it. It was kind of a pain. Yeah, the software is really cumbersome there. My Flirc seems to refuse to take updates

to certain buttons now. I don't know what's going on with that. So I liked that remote actually it was pretty good uh kind of miserable software i learned about that from your show actually i i didn't mind using it but i think it's it i think i waited i bought it and i was like okay i get it this works uh but i'll wait a year and and and see what happens i i waited i don't know a little while and i got it back out and it was still kind of in the same state on the software. I'm like, oh, this isn't going very far, very fast.

Yeah, they're still at a zero dot software version number and it doesn't seem like they're doing much with it, unfortunately. Yeah, it's too bad. All right. So to wrap up this section, Richard, what was your predictions for 2024? I got this one. So I predicted that Nest was going to come out with a new version of its learning thermostat because it had been about five or six years since we'd seen a new one. They did. And I had also hoped that it would come with matter compatibility.

And it did. So as soon as it came out, I purchased one. I don't particularly like it as much as the older versions. I don't like the design ethos. I don't like that you're required to use the Google app with it instead of using the Nest app. They do not let you use the legacy nest app with the newer thermostat, unfortunately. And as Adam mentioned,

when I reviewed this product on our show, I did discuss just what a hassle it was trying to onboard the thing. So yeah, I, I won. I'm not thrilled that I got the win on this one. So, yeah, I won. I'm not thrilled that I got the win on this one, but I have a new thermostat, so yay. You sound like TJ.

You're doing better than TJ, it sounds like. You still have it. I did keep it. I thought the Nest thermostat looked pretty nice. What is your issue with the design of it? So I'm not a big fan of the smushed sideways mushroom design of the thing. I don't understand why it needs to be glass

all around. And all that really does is add more glare to the overall experience. And as far as the display, I actually find the display confusing because it displays two temperatures, both the same size. One of them is the target. One of them is your setting. Whereas the older thermostats very clearly differentiate between what the actual temperature is and what the set temperature is. And I just don't think that it's as good and as intuitive as the old one was. It's weird.

They don't have that interface you're describing on their website. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you can select what you put on it. You can have it so that it only shows one of the temperatures, but I want to know what the target is. Uh, it also has it so that you can show the outdoor temperature instead of the indoor temperature.

I don't know why you would do that, but yeah, it's fine. Interesting. It's fine. High, high praise from Richard. I mean, he didn't say he hated it.

So, I mean, that's pretty good. Yeah. Kept it. Yeah. We'll end on it's fine. Moving on to the next subject now. Let's look ahead to 2025 and what our smart home predictions will be. I, for this order, I ran out of ideas.

So I just told Chad GPT to give me an order of our names and it's been on an order. So I'm going to kick it off with Richard. Chad likes me. All right. So, uh, my prediction is based on kind of, kind of something that we were talking about earlier, Seth, you were saying how Apple really hasn't done much with AI. And you're right, they haven't done much with it. They're coming out with stuff very slowly. But a big hole in what they announced was the Apple Home stuff. Nothing for Apple Home was included in their AI roadmap that they laid out at the last WWDC. So my prediction is that they will do that this year, that this year they will lay out their roadmap and let us know.

We might not see it this next year, but it may, like other things that get announced at WWDC, come in later releases. And I think we're going to see assistance from Siri in setting up your smart home stuff and trying to make the process of automating your smart home a little bit easier. And we're seeing other companies start to do this. You've talked about this. We've talked about how Josh AI incorporated some of this stuff. And I think this is the next logical use case for this sort of technology when you have a home product to offer. So maybe this

is more hopeful than predictive, but I'm just going to go out there and make it a prediction. We call that a wish cast, Richard. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. So I think you can't talk about this without talking about the oft rumored kind of HomePod with a screen and what all that's going to involve. With a robot arm? The one with the robot arm? Yeah. With the round.

Yeah. whip around yeah i mean i've heard everything from you know a a simple kind of screen one to yeah more advanced robot arm one to you know you can mount it in the wall which i know richard's excited about that he wants a a wall mounted i do you know apple video home pod um video pod whatever we want to call it but i think i i do hope they they deliver here uh we still have a large amazon echo in our kitchen and i still think uh a voice assistant device with a screen is um is a killer device for a for a common area for a family so i really hope they don't screw this up and uh deliver something that that people really like in this space yeah even if it's the worst voice assistant i mean there's only one way to go right you can

only go yeah and i wanted to mention that when we were talking about siri earlier too like if anybody's done any sort of voice chatting with with chat gpt and and their voice mode like it's just so clearly better like it's just so clearly more conversational more understanding and yeah i agree with what everybody else said earlier it's so frustrating to be able to give a simple command and get garbage back and it just makes you not want to use it yeah and um you know i do worry about apple and all their promises with ai and especially that all of their marketing really encompass their plan for like the next year plus of of ai and so what happens when a bunch of people get new iphones under the christmas tree this year and then see what what they get for that and maybe aren't super happy with that.

So hopefully they can get it there by the time most people have compatible devices, but I'm a little underwhelmed with what they have so far. Next up in the list was TJ. My prediction for 2025 is I think we're going to see more, I'm going to say more robots in a way. So things like the Litter Robot, Robot Lawnmowers, maybe more advanced Robot Vacuums and Mops, that kind of thing. This year, we kind of saw more advancements in the Robot Lawnmowers. They've

come down a lot in price. We've seen cheaper advancements with the, I forget what, the RTK Vision and other stuff like that. I mean, you can buy a Segway Navimo, which I own, for under $1,000 now, and you don't have to bury a guide wire

around the lawn or anything like that. And so I think this year or next year, we're going to see a lot more of those different types of robots and the price come down for them. I agree. Are we going to get a robot that'll actually like be useful

in the home kitchen? Like, do you think we're ever going to see that? Like a maid robot? You want it to like serve dishes? Rosie the robot? So I know there are a couple of companies working on cooking robots and there's there's one that actually has like articulating arms and everything and it's creepy as hell

um it it's built in so it's not like it walks around or anything um there's another that looks and works a little bit more like a vending machine might, but it actually cooks from prepared bins of food that are refrigerated and stuff like that. So I like I'd love to see some new areas improved by robotics and not just in a gimmicky way. Cough, Tesla, cough. Wellla cough what maybe maybe you know um who who knows who it might end up being but i i hope it's going to be expensive um but i do hope we see these sorts of things coming out soon and hopefully it's not just a group of people in a back room remote controlling the robot to cook for you too right they'll be in a different country but similar concept yeah that's the subscription i agree though i i i was looking forward to that i think they're getting close to it um once the ai matures more i think we'll be there but even still the price will be so high

that it won't be affordable probably to me yet and that's still probably to me probably like five years away or so before it's normal yeah i mean these things cost even then it's going to still cost thousands of dollars these things are not going to be cheap i think the vending machine like one called chefy i believe i think that's like a ten,000 investment before you even have your contractor come in and take out a cabinet so it can be installed. So it's a lot. You can afford that. You can probably afford a personal chef too. That's true too. Moving on, Adam, what are your predictions for 2025?

I feel like Richard kind of stole mine a little bit, but I guess I'll take a little bit of a different spin on it. So, yeah, I still I think AI kind of putting a spin on some of what we already have to be able to make smart home more accessible. And particularly, I'm talking about smart home more accessible um and particularly i'm talking about smart home automation so i think you know ai home assistant some of these other tools that connect devices together like this is the first problem we have to solve we got to get all the things talking to each other um to me ai solves the um making those things easier to command and control and automate. And to me, that's always been the promise of what we called like the conscious home. Simple things like sort of what Gavin described, having the millimeter wave sensors know when somebody's in a room uh you know today

you can certainly go in and put together some complex automations to do that but for that to be useful for normal people uh it just needs like we need another we need that ai layer to just like do common sense things in the home based on what's going on around you. Right. You know, if everybody's gone to bed in the house, you know, turn off all the lights downstairs, make sure the doors are locked, you know, set the alarm, stuff like that. So I don't think it's necessarily, you know, we're not going to get that magical promise all in 2025, but I'd like to see some progress towards it and hopefully we'll, we'll get there. And I'm just going to continue this into my prediction because it's pretty

much the same thing, but I just think in 2025 AI is going to be more mainstream, whether or not it works well is going to be one thing, but it's going to, and we're already starting to see that. Right. So with Siri just releasing was 18.2 and they they kind of offload onto chat gpt to get better answers and stuff like that you have amazon promising their

stuff google's already starting to ship some stuff in some of their products you know home assistant already lets you tie it into um llms or you know chat gpt or whatever you want i think it's gonna be more mainstream where everybody's just going to know about it and be using it and just get used to it at that point. They may not like it, but I think it's still going to be there. And I expect that to happen in 2025

and it will mature later on after that. No, I mean, I wrote earlier this today, I was like prediction, AI, AI everywhere. Yes. And that's pretty much it. I mean, it was already a buzzword, and it will continue to be a buzzword. What's nice is these large language models that have come out, I think the work there is already done.

The improvements that they're making to the large language models are very minimal at best at this point i think they're tapped out on them i mean if they get better yay great but now where we need to develop the applications over the top of it that enter that you can interact with chat is one of them you can use chat to interact with them but you can use all sorts of other stuff to interact with these language models and it will be interesting to see how that gets applied from the top down. I was just talking about how you can get Siri to make your automations easier. It's like, if Siri can figure out how to program the shortcuts app,

that would be great. Yes. Yes. That's a piece of garbage. I agree. Good Lord. Sometimes it's just a little thing that will make life so much better. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's like, there's all sorts of, I mean, as a programmer, I'm using like AI stuff every day where I can just kind of go in and say, I wanted to do this. I wanted to look like this. It's got too much shadow there. And it goes and it makes these little tweaks here and there and like i don't have to go digging through the code and find out oh yeah it was this line that that did that like it'll it'll it'll find that element or whatever and and fix it so i mean it's kind of nice like those are those are coming out every single day they're getting better uh every every month it seems like at least for the programmer side of stuff um so it

would only be a matter of time before ideas and other interfaces i would say interfaces is the right word uh to these large language models uh is is prevalent and everybody's i mean it's funny like you talk to people and it's like oh oh yeah, we have this AI thing this year. I'm like, yeah, of course you do. Everybody's got to have an AI plan this year. What are you going to do without AI? Like you're not even, who are you if you don't even have AI? So, except, I mean, the pro space, there's probably not going to be any AI in the pro space.

There'll probably be like anti-AI in the pro space for quite some time i i imagine uh but yeah i i think i think we'll it'll be interesting to see what some of the applications are i guess i say applications what the interfaces to these large things models are um and and come to be over the next year or so because the the work is done like you can you can host these things on on very small pieces of hardware now, as evident by the home assistant stuff that's coming out. And it will be interesting to see what developers do with it at this point and how far companies are going to take it and what ideas come out of it. And shockingly, at my company, we've rolled out Microsoft Copilot. And this is the first introduction to working with these things that a lot of people at work are getting.

So they're using Copilot to write their long emails or to create presentations and stuff like that. And they're loving it. So, you know, eventually when it comes into their home, they'll be ready for it, you know, from the experience from work. So you're going to see more of that. Yeah i have this funny comic that that has on one it's like just two panels on one panel it's like i can use ai to make this email more you know eloquent and blah blah and then over on the other panels i can use the ai to make summarize this email into a bullet point it's like we're missing the point but yeah you're right gavin it's like they'll be the point. But yeah, you're right, Gavin. It's like, it's the exact same way computers worked, right?

Like people use them at work and they got comfortable on the bottom home. It'll be that way as well. This is going to be the clip art of 2025. It's going to be misused by everyone. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, absolutely. I think it already was and it already is but there will be good

interfaces into these language models that really do work well. Some of them we may not have even seen. Some of it may just be like back end stuff where it just takes a bunch of data and spits out computer code for another AI to read or another program to read

from. And that, that, that's really going to be kind of like where I think some of this is going to shine where, where these large language models are able to derive data out of a large set of data from your house or something like that. That, that, that will be nice. Yep. And finally, Seth, your predictions for 2025. Oh, just AI, AI everywhere is what I said. Like, it's like, I really don't have much more. that will be nice yep and finally seth your predictions for 2025 oh just ai ai everywhere

is what i said like it's like i really don't have much more um i mean i i don't think and yet you listed two other things i know i know i didn't know what to do here yeah yelling at me for multiple options seth has all these options you know when i wrote this there was no one else had anything on here so i think there was a lot of copy and paste don't blame us uh yeah i mean i wrote uh for the diy side probably more day one integrations with matter or home assistant i think we kind of talked on that as well like it seems to be like those are the two talking points when people are coming out with products these days and then um you know pros pro side of i get anyone's guess what the pros or the pro market's going to do it again it's unfortunately been a shrinking market for for that as evident by all the mergers and

acquisitions you know you basically you're down to one very large distributor for the world now like it's not even for the states it's for the world and uh and that's it that's it so it'll be interesting to see what happens there business-wise. But yeah, I think as far as like, as far as products go for the home, I think we're going to see just a flood of AI generated stuff or AI powered stuff

or what we're calling AI. I would say large language model powered stuff for 2025, which will be good. And some of it will be good. Some of it will be incredibly bad, but some of it will be good. And some of it would be good. Some of it would be incredibly bad, but some of it will be good overall. Common theme here,

AI good and bad. No, it likes to hallucinate. So as long as it doesn't do that, as long as Siri doesn't hallucinate, I'll take it because right now Siri's really good at hallucinating. I just don't want, I just don't want to hallucinate and set my temperature and my thermostat.

So like 99 degrees or something, you know, you know it's like well it should be hotter in here not that hot all right well on that note we had a lot of good conversation here you know um a lot to look forward to in 2025 ai but you know we're gonna wrap things up but before we do we're gonna we're gonna do you know some plugs some promotion you know where can you find us uh this order i went by my final order least active to most active on social media you know from what i see you know there's a weird way just mastodon right i mean you're only on mastodon from what i see and you know the one that lead this list was least active. I think it's probably Adam.

That's because I'm not on Mastodon that often. There you go. So, yeah. Come listen to our show, The Smart Home Show. I am still on X. Probably just mainly out of laziness. Although I don't go on there very often anymore. And I show up on Mastodon every once in a while.

And you can find me on there too. Just search for me. Awesome. I think I'm the next least active. You can find me on Mastodon, gavincampbell at hometech.social. I'm also on X. Don't really post much, but I read a lot. It's GVN Campbell.

And I joined Blue Sky. I also browse through there too. Gavin Campbell on there is where you can find me. TJ? I am way more active on Threads. So you can find me at ThatSickWhiteKidOnThreads. That's a good name right there.

Or you can find me on HomeTech.fm or you can visit Huddleston.bio to see all of my stuff I do. Seth? All right. Well, I'm super active on TikTok, guys. I think that's the way of the future. So if you guys want to follow me over.

At least until January 19th. You haven't followed him months ago. One month. Yeah, no, I am mostly, I peruse the hometech. dot social so you can head over to home tech dot social find me seth at home tech dot social that's probably where i will be you can also find me over the home tech lot of fun podcast uh where every week i sit down with uh three of the people on the call here and we we chat about stuff stuff all sorts of stuff um and the projects we we have going on in our house. And it's always a fun conversation.

And then finally, I miss Annoyed Richard on social media, but that was one of my favorite accounts. But Mr. Richard, where can we find you? Yeah, so again, Adam and I co-host the Smart Home Show. So you can find that over at smarthome.fm. Again, remember, if you're interested in that mill, we have a promo code for that. So check out the episode where we reviewed that

and you can get that code. Gets you 200 bucks off the price, which is pretty good. And you can find me not on Twitter, but on Mastodon at Richard Gunther. And I am also on Instagram. no no no no vertical short form videos for me sorry sorry i i know i have a great plug-in i would like to recommend actually called eat the shorts um written by a developer we know aaron pierce Pierce, that you can put on your browser and it will just make all the shorts in your browser when you look at YouTube disappear. So you don't have to be annoyed by short form videos if you don't like them.

And so anyway, Instagram as Richard W. Gunther. And I did join blue sky recently and I am there as richardgunther.com because somebody already had the Richard Gunther name and I can use my domain name as a handle. So I did that. So, and, uh, I'm pretty active. Uh, if I'm the last one here, I guess, uh, that's acknowledgement that I'm, i'm pretty much posted all the time i think you should i think you should bring back angry richard on x like that could be your only presence on x and i feel like it would be very appropriate you'd fit in great possibly i i really just might get the wrong following on x i have no desire to do anything that helps that company.

So I'm really just not interested in joining there. I do tag some of my posts on Mastodon as what annoys me or what I've learned or what account I would have associated it with in the past. So you can follow that tag and you'll probably, I'm probably the only one doing that tag. It was a fun tag. I agreed with a lot of things. That's all I have to say. But on that note,

we're going to wrap up things here. I just want to thank all the listeners for joining us in 2024. You know, we hope you have a great holiday and I hope we see you all again in 2025. All right. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Happy new year. Happy holidays. Thanks for listening.