HomeTech.fm - Episode 555 - The 11th Annual Technology.fm Fireside Chat

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

The 11th annual Technology.fm Fireside Chat brings together a group of smart home podcasters for a year-end roundtable on the biggest developments of the past year. Richard Gunther and Adam Justice from the Smart Home Show join Gavin, TJ, and Seth to reflects on key products, platforms, and trends that shaped the smart home, what worked, what disappointed, and what it all means heading into the year ahead.

Welcome back to a holiday tradition that's now over a decade in the making. It's time for the 11th annual Technology.fm fireside chat. As we start to close the book on 2025, we're gathering the family back once again to make sense of the year that was and place our bets on the year to come. Tonight, worlds collide as Adam Justice, Richard Gunter from the Smart Home Home HomeShow show join the forces with the crew over at HomeTech.fm. Gavin Campbell, T.J. Helveston, and myself, Seth Johnson, for this ultimate crossover event where we break down the biggest tech wins and the most disappointing flops. And the trends that actually mattered here in 2025.

From the smart home platforms that finally played nice, to the AI integrations, we didn't know we needed or didn't even want. We're covering it all, plus stick around for, we dust off the old crystal balls for our annual predictions segment to see what we think is going to happen here in 2026. With that said, poor drink, slide on up a chair, get comfortable here next to the fire, and let's get started. Let's take it a little round robin here and do a couple of introductions. Adam, let's start with you.

Sure. Adam Justice, co-host of the Smart Home Show with Richard, and then CEO of a small business called GridConnect, where we build connected hardware, both for the industrial market and for the smart home. and we've got a handful of connected products ourselves under the ConnectSense brand. How would you, T.J.? My name is T.J. Huddleston. I own a low voltage company in Central Ohio, and I also own a monitored security business as well. Richard?

Yeah, I'm Richard Gunther, and I am half of the co-hosts of the Smart Home Show when we put that out with Adam Justice. and I am a digital technology consultant working with companies including smart home companies like Adams and I will pass to Seth. I'm Seth Johnson. I am a co-host on the HomeTech.com podcast and I guess in my workywork, day job stuff right now, I'm a digital lead for a lighting company based out of LA

and called DMF. If you're in the lighting field, you're probably heard of them. But I kind of work on their e-commerce side of things. So that's what I'm up to. And who we got left, Gavin? I think we're Gavin, right? I'm glad you remembered me. I'm Gavin Campbell, one-third of the HomeTech.

He's there. People usually forget me. But my day job, I'm not involved in smart home at all in my day job. It's just a hobby of mine, and I love it. All right, all right. Well, that's the crew this year. And welcome back, everyone. Welcome back.

As we like to do in start off, we talk about. about what to you was the biggest story of the year? And we kind of have like in your space, but like, you know, what do you think the biggest story of the year was in 2025? TJ, we'll start off with you. Last year you said sonos, which, yeah, I guess that's right. We still talked about it this year a whole lot. But what about what do you think the biggest story was this year?

Yeah, for me, the biggest story was wireless protocols. You know, a year or two ago, we really saw the matter spec come into everybody's house, either through Wi-Fi or thread or a couple different ways. But this year, we saw some updates to Z-Wave and Zigby as well, which I honestly thought would kind of just fall by the wayside and disappear. Here towards the end, we got the update to Zigby 4.0, which includes, was it a Susie, and that adds some lower frequency things to Zigby that's always been missing.

And even Z wave got some new products, you know, like the Z wave antenna from Home Assistant, for example, that I just didn't see really happening. So in general, I think for me, is just wireless protocols, no matter what it was. Very cool. Very cool. Gavin, you said last year, Home Assistant,

but what do you think this year? Home Assistant's always a big story. But I think this year, bigger than that, was probably the introduction of Alexa Plus and Google Gemini, the AI integration into the smart home speaker space. I mean, most of the time we just talked about whether or not we got it or if somebody got it. That's why it's the biggest news you talked about it the most. Anyone haven't yet?

Exactly. Yeah. I got it eventually. I got it a couple weeks ago. And it to me is a significant upgrade. It was one of the bigger stories this year. Worth the wait. Worth the wait.

All right. Adam, you said last year, Matters still trying. They're still trying. What do you think the big story was this year? Yeah. So I think this is kind of a reaction to matter, but, you know, I kind of see now the, what I call the local first rebellion, which is, you know, what you guys talk about all the time with home assistant and just other kind of either their own ecosystems or people kind of just trying to solve the smart home problems themselves. And obviously some of those play nice with matter. But I'm just really, I guess, a bit dismayed at how much matter still. sucks and how unreliable it can be. I want it to be good. And I still think, like, I still have faith it's going to get there. But the reliability is just kind of rough. And so I've abandoned some of my matter stuff, particularly like thread devices. I found super unreliable. Are you saying, are you seeing your personal life you've abandoned matter? Okay. No, not in the business.

Yeah. Oh, in the business site. Okay. Yeah. We do have one client that we have a matter. hub for, but it's more, uh, it's matter on the like Wi-Fi. Um, it's, it's at the hub level. It's not doing, you know, thread stuff and, and that kind of stuff. So yeah, still some ways to go. Um, but I finally, um, installed home assistant. Uh, I'm not fully, uh, in or using it as much as you guys are, but, uh, maybe, maybe that'll come in in 2026 for me. Yeah, we, we have a paid service that you can, uh, I mean, I, I, I don't know. It, how expensive is Gavin as a service. I could be bought with food.

Yeah. It's pretty much it. Yeah, I even installed home assistant this year. Me, even me. No, I'm not actively using it, but I use it as a test ground for stuff and playing around with stuff. Yeah, probably use them more than Seth, right?

I don't know. I mean, he's always updating it, so. Always update, yeah. Yeah. Well, every week I get a reminder. Hey, it's time to update. Okay, let's up. There you go.

There you go. I am curious, has this been everybody's experience with Niter and Thread even still? Because I feel like this year Matter, matter finally, matter over thread finally got better. Like, I'm finding it much more reliable than it was before. I'm still having problems. Like, I'll add devices to matter on Home Assistant and they just either will fail to add or something. I'm starting to think it may be my setup. I don't know.

but it's also, I just can't bother to try and figure it out. So I've been just avoiding matter too. I don't want to fight with another protocol. I already spent too much time fighting with Zigby and Z-Wave for so many years. And now they work great. I don't want to fight with another one. I think we are seeing actually more thread, or matter over thread devices at this point, right?

Because when it first launched, everybody was just releasing Matter over Wi-Fi devices. And it was just old devices that they had laying around, that they just so happened update to it. And now this year, we've actually seen a lot of matter over thread devices where it's actually becoming like a thing that you can go find. Yeah, yeah. And really, except for hubs and bridges, I don't want Wi-Fi matter devices. I'm trying to move more toward isolating to these other bandwidths.

I'm not, I'm not even bought into the ecosystem. Like, I don't, I don't really have a place that it would live and I'm not, I'm not, I see all the pain points everybody has. I'm like, I don't want that for my life. So I just, I'm sorry. Like, you guys go through the struggles. I'll wait for it to come out and be madder 2.0 and be, you know, fine. Right. There's no reason for you to move at this point.

No, no, not at all. I mean, there's plenty of solid working product out there with other protocols. Zigby Z wave, Control 4 junk. Like, I mean, I've got, I've still got Control 4 lighting control throughout the house. It's not going anywhere. It works. I don't have to break it for something else. although it did add to Z-Wave switches

and this year through Home Assistant. And I found Matters just introducing things that we already have at this point, right? Like switches and buttons and stuff. We already have that in Z-Wave or Zigby and stuff. I think that's going to change a little with the introduction of the cameras, though. I think it will probably pick up a little more momentum than.

That was going to be kind of my question for the group is what do you think it's going to take for Matter to get people to jump in? Five years. It's going to take time, right? Because at this point, like, matter is good for the average person because they don't have to think about it. But it's going to take time to actually get all the stuff working properly and for everybody to support everything. I mean, if you look at the standard, they've really come far this year.

But there's still a lot of stuff that's not actually supported or they've just added support for recently. And the problem at this point is that everybody requires their own individualized apps and services in order to use the full features of those devices. and that's fine for certain things like cameras and stuff like that but it's not fine for like light switches and outlets and everything else i think that's i mean we could we could probably spend an hour just talking about that struggle alone but i think that struggle exists for manufacturers because they want a way to differentiate themselves in their own product and not be commoditized and so that's that's sort of the battle that's going on here is like people want to interoperability, but manufacturers want a reason why you're going to pick them. And I don't know

how you resolve that. Yeah, I kind of agree. Adam, I don't think that's going away. Just for that simple matter. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, I don't think that's going away because it's, that's, that is how they differentiate between the products. It's how one matter-compatible present sensor is going to do something else that another one doesn't do or have another feature that another one doesn't have they're going to they're going to build that in the app but that's not the purpose of matter to bring all those things in um now they should expose the automations like they should they should expose like a way to access that information through matter somehow but i can see how they they will take some of the features especially around setup um and they may move those over to

their own thing and then it would be nice if they triggered like i can think of like the present sensors and how those all kind of work, like, I can set it up in the ACAR app, right? And I think in if I do that, and I have like these zones that'll trigger either presence positive or negative, right? And I, that's all I need. I don't need to set it up through matter. I don't need to set up like X, Y coordinates through matter. No, I don't care. Let's use the ACAR app for that. And then I'll switch over and run the automations off, off of the events that happen somewhere else. Or use the ACAR app. I don't care. Yeah. Well, maybe we can dive into that example a little bit more when we get into favorite products later.

All right, all right. Sounds good. Richard, I'm going to jump to you real fast. What was your biggest story? Last year you said Sonos was the big story. You agreed with TJ. Yeah, I was jumping on the pile on on Sonos last year. Well deserved.

Yeah, okay. I agree. So this year, so I was struggling because I really thought I really was initially going to put what you put down, Seth. So I'm looking forward to your discussion. But I think as a good second, I find it interesting this year that while Home Assistant is becoming more and more popular, you hear more people talking about it, more companies taking it seriously now. At the same time, we're seeing this huge pushback from companies who are deathly afraid of losing control of their product to third parties. And, you know, the, the poster child of this, of course, is

Chamberlain. Yeah. As they continue to make headlines, even this last week, while companies like the guy who's making Rad G-D-O or however you pronounce that product are really trying to work around the limitations of the lock-in that Chamberlain has created. So, you know, you've Seth talked about the challenges with BMW now locking everything down. And so you could have all these capabilities where you could integrate all the things in your life. There are, in fact, part of the internet of things. But nope, you're going to have to do it the way the manufacturer wants you to do it and be happy with it, even though their app experience probably sucks and doesn't integrate with the things you want it to integrate with.

I find it all very frustrating. I think, I hope that the companies that are taking this defensive stance get a lot of pushback for it, get a lot of blowback, lose market share. And I think we should be doing what we can to help educate consumers over why that's such a bad thing. Right. Yeah, I guess to bring people up to speed on that one, Chamberlain basically came out and said all of their future garage door. openers are not going to allow kind of third-party access to any of your, you know, kind of other controllers. So there will be no dry contacts.

There will be no other ways to access it. And basically it's going to be their ecosystem or the highway. That's okay. I'll just choose another garage door opener in North America. Who do? What choices do I have, Adam? Yeah, none. What choices do I have?

Hmm. Well, I mean, technically there are some choices, but they're not. well-known brands, right? So it's challenging. Yeah. It seems like it's asking, well, I would say almost it seems like it's asking for a DOJ referral, but probably not getting you wearing in this environment. Yeah, that's an interesting point, though. Yeah. Because it is a very monopolistic approach. This is why my favorite company in the smart home space right now, third reality, just came out with their amazing garage door opener, which is basically like a switchbot finger bot that just presses a button. And you know what? As an

integrator who's been doing this for over a decade now, this is what we did as a professional. So I'm glad to see it come into the consumer space. Not in my damn house. Yeah. I saw that in Jennifer Toey's article and it was like good luck, good luck

working around this one. Because you basically just put your garage door remote into the middle of the thing. And it's like, that's where people are going to go. If they keep doing this, it's like, you life will find a way. Exactly, exactly.

All right, I will go on to me here. Last year I said it was going to be the bigies struggling with AI, the big companies trying to figure out how to stick AI into their products. And I think that's happened. This year, I think the big story was tariffs. As we rounded the year, these tariffs came in. And I had an interesting experience with these because I kind of experienced from a manufacturer who was directly impacted. acted by this, and I saw all the stuff that happens on the back end. And you know what, guys, you know what companies love more than anything. Anything. It's uncertainty. They love uncertainty.

We had no idea if the tariffs were going to apply, when they were going to affect, had no, like going into all this, every manufacturer out there just didn't know. Some of them preemptively raised their prices. Some of them weighted. Some of them raised prices on certain products and then, you know, rolled that into the price. Some of them put a little tariff thing. as soon as you went and check out. That's what we actually did. We have a little tariff thing. It's a tariff and you paid a little extra for that.

Then when we couldn't figure out if it was going to stick around or not, I think we just ended up giving up and we ended up raising all of our prices too and remove the tariff line. And I cannot tell you how much money that wastes. Oh my God, if I could tell you how many meetings with people with six-figure salaries

sat around and had to figure out the strategy around this tariff thing that didn't need to freaking happen. So we could all have higher prices to pay. Oh, my God. Like, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. But Seth, the other countries pay for the tariffs, right?

Oh, no, no, no, no. You're paying for the, you pay. You pay tariff. Oh, I know well. You want the little boo-boo? It's going to be $200 now. Yeah. We dealt with this too, and it's just such a waste on, yeah, like you said, the brain power of

American corporations, the, you know, the trickle-down effect, you know, the number of man hours we probably lost as a country dealing with this, let alone the financial impact is ridiculous. And now the bonus is like, we don't even know where they're legally implemented. They could roll back. I don't know. We'll see what. They could roll back. And if they do, guess what, you guys are all getting a rebate. No, you're not getting repaid on your products. And the prices are going to still be high, right? No one's going to lower their prices now. So thanks. Thanks a lot, stupid government who did this because I'm sorry, that is dumb. And there's a lot of dumb policies that have come from this government and we are getting to live with them and

we're just paying higher prices for them all around. And I'm not enjoying that. So I think for me, the biggest thing this year, at least it affected both my personal and professional life for the first time ever was the stupid politics we live in and the tariffs that got implemented for no damn reason whatsoever. So thanks a lot. That's my story of 2025. Yeah. As a small business owner, this has also been a struggle to face, you know, because it reminds me of COVID when, you know, before COVID, I had like a 30-day timeline on estimates. You know, the estimate's good for 30 days. And during COVID, that changed the 14 days. After a couple years of COVID, we switched it back to 30 days. And now we're back to 14 days because I have no idea what the prices are going to be here in 14 days.

You know, for the longest time, we didn't know if stuff was going to double, triple, if we could even get it. And a lot of the stuff we didn't actually see increases on until recently. You know, I think in the past month or two, ubiquity has added tariff surcharges to their camera. products. But we've also noticed certain things like Sony TVs that just got more expensive this year whenever they came out with a new version. And so we're going to pay them one way or the other. It took a little bit for it to hit the direct consumer space. But when it did hit, it was very painful. Yeah. So the thing that I had wanted to kind of add on to this that I think that a lot of consumers just don't see and understand is all the behind the scenes impacts that this has on

companies. It impacts their ability to stock stuff. It impacts their ability to source stuff, pricing stuff, as you were talking about, Seth. It impacts manufacturers who depend on other companies who are in the same situation. So their supplies potentially come down. We've seen companies reduce some of their product line because they just, it's too complicated if there's more products. So let's just make this a little bit easier and reduce our product line and not support as, you know, continue to carry on all of the products that we're trying to support because we're having such problems. It's been really broad and deep and also reminded me quite a lot of the COVID time when we saw all the supply chain problems. The thing that makes

my blood boil about it is that it's not actually about bringing manufacturing back to America. I know we're not turning into a politics podcast here. But like a lot of the things, you know, the components and the things that we need, like it could take, you know, five to ten years to build up the manufacturing expertise to have those things built here. So there isn't actually a way to just like, you know, onshore all of this, nor is their way to do it quickly. And if they actually wanted that to happen, there would. be policies to like incentivize it and like you know we do some some manufacturing ourselves is like where are the tax breaks on you know you know buying manufacturing equipment or you know not charging

tariffs on components or you know things that would actually incentivize us to actually build more here it's it's not there so um you know it's it's just a tax on the american people and it sucks Yep. All right. Well, let's move on from things that suck, or sucks, I guess. And then move on to our favorite things of 2025. And I'll go first. I have one right here.

It's next. Let me move it over. It is, of course, the AI Horn. Guys, ooh, AI Horn. I don't believe you. I don't believe you. That's a lie. Come on.

All right. AI Horn. Describes the AI industry in a nutshell, though. Yeah. Look at this product that has AI. Wait, never mind. It doesn't have AI. AI horn.

Uh, from ubiquity, yeah, it, it listed as an AI horn in the website, says it has AI events, it has none of these things. It is a horn that plays sounds very loudly. If you turn it up, it does play them very loudly. Uh, but, uh, it is, is not a, it's not a very good product. And what does it cost? It's like three or four hundred dollars. I don't know I bought it, um, uh, but I did. So there we go. And it sits on my desk and just collects dust inside of its AI horn at this point. Uh, one day I'll hook it up. Maybe not. I'll probably just sell it at some point. So why is that your favorite? You do have, wait, do you not have an actual favorite product? I do have a favorite product this year. And my favorite product is, the first part of that is the AI stuff. And it's not the AI you think it is.

I've been toying around from AI from like about this time last year and just really seeing it just exponentially increase in what it can do on the programming side of things, on the development inside of things. I do not see the same thing at all in any consumer-facing product at all. And I am, except for maybe the digital creation stuff on like videos and stuff that Google's come out with recently, that's looking impressive and interesting. But I'm not seeing what I see with the tooling for AI products for developers happen in any way, shape, or form on the smart home side of things or in any other product at all. What we can do inside of, with development tools and the things that are setting up for that is just completely different than the chat, GBT thing that everyone listening to this is probably familiar with.

And Gavin, I shared with him a little while back like a video, who was that, Network Chuck or something like that, who did a really good job of explaining kind of what I'm not explaining right now and how to use agents and how to set things up where you basically subdivide the, I'm putting in air quotes here, labor, that these AI things are doing. And just doing that and improving on the tooling and how things go through. It's absolutely stunning the things I can do off a single prompt that just get done. And it is reinforced to me that AI is a great tool. It is like a hammer. And literally everything looks like a nail for it. But it's a very good hammer.

And if we learned how to use that tool extremely well, I think it's going to be a benefit for us. But we're just hammering everything that looks like. We're just using the hammer on everything these days, unfortunately. But on the developer side, it has been my absolute favorite thing to do. I have been able to program ESP 32 devices for my home in ways that I would never have taken the time to do and implement features on them. not only implement features,

but actually go through the instructional steps of how to set up those devices for programming them with the specialty code that the AI thing generated. I had no idea how to do that. I just asked it for the steps. It sped out a bunch of steps and I was able to complete the task.

Amazing. So, yeah, I really think that the tools that we have on the development side, as soon as you guys start seeing that roll over into the home assistant ecosystem, the Alex ecosystem, all that stuff, it's going to be the promised land for what AI promises to be,

but I'm not seeing that right now. Like on the consumer side, it doesn't exist. It's completely different. You guys are getting such a dumb down version through chat, TBT, than what developers have access to. It's wild. It's wild. So that's my favorite product this year.

I have to back you up, Seth. I have to back you up, Seth, with this one, because when you introduced me to it, I, you know, I was kind of skeptic at first, but by the time I was done with it, I had a whole development team of bots created from a project management. manager to a Git specialist to somebody that just manages the version of the code.

And I'm not even a developer. And what I eventually became was just the client. I just say, hey, I need a script to do this. And the project manager takes it from there and coordinates everything. So, yeah, what you get with the chat GPT and, you know, that type of stuff is very basic. This takes it to the next level. So I agree. And it's, and every, every week it doubles on what it does.

It's insane. It's absolutely, this is the fastest moving product I have ever experienced in my life. And I went through the dot com era. I went through the iPhone era. Like, this is moving faster than any of those things. It's absolutely stunning. I'll kind of third this. I've written more code in 2025 than I have since I was in college, which is a bit scary. And like, I have done, yeah, I am also not a developer and, you know, haven't done anything really with it other than, you know, be around it or manage developers. So I think it's one of those things that I understand,

and I've had some interesting conversations with friends that are very anti-AI, like I think some of you might be, and I'm sure some of our audience is. And I understand where people come from. I understand people's concerns and fears about it. And I think, like, everybody should be a little bit skeptical, but I don't think it's a genie we're going to put back in the bottle

either. Oh, yeah, don't believe anything you see anymore. I mean, at this point forward, do not believe anything you can see. There's no reason to believe any image, any video, any sound, nothing. I could be AI right now. You don't know. But I do think, you know, as people learn how to use it and to use it as a tool and responsibly, you know, they will find it useful in certain places in their life and things like that. And, you know, that's kind of where we are as a business, too, is like trying to find the right use cases and the right places where it can be useful and and kind of bring some value to it. But, you know,

I think it's one of those things to kind of like the dot com era where there was a lot of garbage. And so people just like point at the pets.coms or whatever and say, oh, look, garbage. This is all garbage. Like I kind of feel like whether AI is a bubble or not, like there's going to be some of that and people are going to point to, you know, the AI versions of pets.com and say, you know, this is all awful. But there is something here. And I think, you know, we'll get the,

you know, the Amazon.coms and the, you know, the things that came out of it, out of it. But there will be, you know, there probably will be some disasters along the way, too. Absolutely. All right. That's mine. Richard, what you got for your favorite product in 2025? All right. So my favorite hands down is the Akara 8-2-4-button switch. So at CES, last year, they announced a series of new devices, including the sensor that we've already mentioned, a number of switches, some cameras, and of those, my favorite,

it's almost always going to be a keypad, something that looks and works like a keypad. And out of the gate, this thing is a switch with four buttons on it. It is matter compatible or ZGB compatible, so you can set it up other way, and you can use it with any matter system. It exposes all four buttons as triggers, and it controls three loads. It has three outputs. Your top three buttons can each control a separate. load if you want them to. They don't have to because you have that ability to just read the value of the switch and and set up some scenes that way if you wanted to or just use the switch press as a trigger as well. So this is an incredibly, incredibly flexible device. It's slick looking as heck and I'm just thoroughly impressed with it. I had been using these keypads from Levitin.

since they came out with those a while ago, the fact that this has the option to control multiple things, I think is a whole lot more useful. And having a relay behind three of those buttons, too, is just really powerful. So I can't, I think it costs me like 60 bucks. It's absolutely worth it. Don't need the Accara Hub.

If you have the Accara Hub, you can use it with it. it'll let you do things like change the button LED colors and stuff like that but it's not necessary. Nice, very nice. I like it. I like the look of it too.

It's a very nice looking device. Yep. Very, very discreet buttons. It's a very subdued design. It's not obnoxious and in your face. It doesn't have any designs or writing on anything. So as someone who likes, likes to engrave my own buttons, I don't have to worry about, like, working around or trying

to switch out any of the buttons that already have some sort of indicators on them. I might have to look at this for my house. So the interior walls of my house are all two by two because it was built in 1959. And so I cannot have more than a single switch next to each other. And so right now I'm using a bunch of relays inside of, like, fan canopies and, like, exhaust fans and stuff like that because I have to. There's not a lot of good options for multi-button smart switches. So I might have to look at this for my bathroom specifically.

So I have some physical button for my exhaust fan. Yep. All right, TJ, you're up next. What's your favorite product in 2025? My favorite product is not a local product, ironically. It is Twinkly. I've been buying Twinkly lights for the past, I'd say four or five years. And I know other people, I think Richard,

maybe you have some problems with Twinkly. Yeah, their app. It sucks. It does. It's not great. I would agree with that for the most part. But there are ones to use it once a year, though.

That's right. Every time I pull my twinkly lights out of my Christmas box, they just work. They connect to my Wi-Fi again. They do an upgrade. And then I'm back working with the app. There's not a lot of stuff going on with it. And I'm a very simple kind of control guy.

I just want on and off. And it does that through a home assistant as well. This year I kind of went a little overboard. I've been buying lights, you know, from Menards and Lowe's and Home Depot every time they go on clearance after the holidays. But this year I wanted to get some more lights and I kind of went all in with Twinkly. I think I have about five sets now along with a Twinkly Christmas tree I bought off a Facebook marketplace. So it just makes it so easy to control lights. I hear Seth talking all the time about getting like WLAD and all these other like light drivers.

and I don't have it the desire to do any of that. I just want to plug it in, connect it to my Wi-Fi, and make it work because I only use it once a year for like a month and a half, and that's it. I don't want to mess with it at all. So my shout-out is Twinkly this year. It just keeps being great.

Hopefully they keep being around because I just spent a lot of money out on this year. Nice. Very nice, yeah. I'm envious of the Christmas tree, honestly. We just bought ours this year. Last year, we did a fake one. This year, we did a real one.

And again, and now I have to, we just brought it in, so it's in there, it's ready to be decorated, that whole or deal ahead of me. Yeah, we've done a, we've done a real one for the past four or five years, but this year, we added a shed, so we actually have some storage, and I was like, I'm just going to get an artificial tree. And it went together in, like, three minutes. You know, all my life, we bought artificial trees, but they've always been the cheap ones from, like, Walmart or Big Lots or something like that, and they take, like, an hour or two to put together. This one took three minutes to put together, including connecting it to my, my app, so well worth the money. I don't know if I'd spend $700 on it, but it was worth it for $200. Nice.

Yeah, there you go. That's a great deal. All right. Gavin, what's your favorite product in 2025? So this one, I'm going to have to say, is the Cara FP300. So ever since the first time I heard of millimeter wave sensors, I've been on the lookout for them. I've bought a number of them.

I've tried them, you know, and they all had their downfalls when it came to sensing and stuff like that. And a lot of them were also you had to power them through a cable, which I didn't like as well. I wanted a battery operated solution. And it took a while for me to get my hands on this because they announced it last year, CES, and I didn't get it till probably last month or so eventually it came here. And it does have some confusion around it. It does have some setup issues, you know, like how you can configure it or what best way to configure it and stuff. But once you get it working and once you go through the configuration options, I love it. It doesn't give me me false positives. You know, it does exactly what I wanted to do. I can set the sensitivity.

I can set the ranges of sensitivity. So I can say only detect between three and five meters if you want and, you know, stuff like that. It's a very powerful device, battery powered so you can put it anywhere in the room. You know, unlike like, I know they're putting millimeter waves into the light switches. Well, you're kind of stuck where light switches and the range too, right? This one you can put anywhere in the room. I've had no issues with it. Since getting it set up, I bought three and I'm trying to get my hands on more. They're just always sold out.

So that's my pick. And just my runners up. I just want to mention Alexa Plus and the Home Assistant ZWA 2 antenna. Love it. All right. There we go. Adam, what was your favorite product this year? So I kind of struggled a little bit to think of this.

And my old Hugh Bridge died in the transition where you had to add an account to it. I could never add an account. And then eventually all my hue stuff stopped working, which really upset me. And for a long time, like, I just ended up shutting my closet door at night because the lights could never turn off. So when the Hugh Bridge Pro came out, I was like, hazza, I'm going to finally, like, reconstruct my Hugh life one device at a time. So that's exactly what I did.

I don't actually like it probably for the Bridge Pro kind of reasons, although I guess that'll be useful in the long term. but it kind of allowed me to get all of our huge stuff working in the house again and helped keep my wife happy. So that's, but like picking a hub is a super lame answer. So my real answer, I've entered my old man phase and I got a bird buddy for Father's Day. Oh, nice. And just a delightful device.

And the kids all would fight over naming. the birds. Like if you have their subscription that does their like AI bird detection, it actually like finds unique birds and so you can name them and so the kids would give them goofy names and, you know, see which ones come back

and all that. So had a lot of fun with that this year. I've had the the bird thing set up on my cameras where was a bird net? The bird net. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just looking out last night actually. We had a bar down at that. Barred out. Yeah, every time

I hear about bird buddy. I really want one. I'm the type of person that I also feed the birds. And so I have like three or four bird feeders throughout the property here. And the bird buddy just sounds, it sounds so nice. You can just see all the birds and have little snapshots of them. Yeah, they take their little bird selfies. It's delightful. All right. All right. So that's our favorite products for the year. And next segment we have is our predictions segment, which first We go back and grade ourselves to see how we did last year. And Adam, we'll stick with you. What was your prediction last year and how do you think you did?

Yeah. So my prediction was AI plus matter plus other tools equals smart home, easier smart home automations. And I'm going to give myself a bronze on this if we're going with gold, bronze, and silver. Because I don't think we're here yet. I just don't see this happening. You know, Gavin seems excited about Alexa Plus, but I'm not even really seeing much smart home magic with that yet. So, you know, I'm just not seeing kind of to what you were saying too, Seth. Like, I don't think AI has become useful yet in this domain for me.

Yeah. And just, you know, to talk about that, like they've now got the AI in there. And when you work with AI, you have to give it context. You got to give it data, right? So the more data like in my house, it has all my temperature sensors throughout the whole house, right? So when I have conversations with it about, you know, the temperatures in my house, it will actually analyze it and say, hey, this room's cooler than the other rooms. Do you want to talk about how we can fix that, right?

And that's where it starts to get a little better. I don't think we're there yet, but we're starting to get there. We had a listener right in with an interesting product. I actually installed and started kind of using, but it kind of gets us in the ballpark of what we, T.J. and I have been screaming at the top of our lungs, like, home

home assistant should be, or like all of these home automation platforms should be. And it does what Gavin's talking about. It kind of like gathers up the context and ships it off to a large language model of your choice. And then what it does, it turns around and spits back like some YAML code

that you can then click a green button to install. And it's, it's done well, but, like, this should be, like, this should be, like, this should be, it should be better, honestly. Like, I mean, it is a good, um, first step that I think someone's doing, you know, as a side project for home assistant, but honestly, like, this should be kind of like where things go. And, and the whole question in displaying, like, a big giant block of yamble, like, no one wants to see that. Like, just make it happen. Like, just install the automation. And then I'll figure out if it doesn't work or not. And then we'll work on getting it to work or something like that.

So, yeah, it's got some ways to go, but we seem to be making, making some steps that direction. Yeah, I think one of the things that people need is, like, sure, plug in all your things and your sensors and whatnot. But, like, people need to know the art of the possible. Like, I think most people, you know, we all think in a programmatic fashion and can kind of dream up some of these automations. But I think for your normal person, they need to know, oh, this is the data I have and these are some of the things we can automate. And I think that's where I'm hopeful that it'll get there. Some like creative suggestions or something. It's definitely one of those things that just needs to happen in the background.

And because the average consumer, I'm telling you right now, does not care about this. They just wanted to happen because they're not going to think of those ideas, even if you suggest them. I mean, that's the reason Alexa and all these other products keep telling you what to do. is because people aren't doing those things because I just don't think the average consumer cares. They just wanted to happen. And that's kind of how I am at this point. Like, I just wanted to do whatever AI things in the background.

But you don't have to tell me. Be proud about it, but just do it in the background. TJ, I think, like we talked about this last week on the show. Like, you and I, we check our EcoB app to basically, like, turn it up a degree or put it in a vacation mode or something. We don't, I don't care what the Eagle B thermostat is doing. I don't use it. If I need to know what the temperature in the house is, I might walk by it

or I'll check my phone for it occasionally. But like, it's not the center of an ecosystem. And honestly, that's, it's funny to say this, but that's how home assistant should be. It doesn't need to be the center of the ecosystem. It just needs to be the glue that kind of binds everything together.

And that'd be good enough. Like, if it did a great job of that, an excellent job of that, that's all it needs to do. It doesn't need to have all these fancy things on top of it. It doesn't even have to have a UI for all I care. It just needs to do the stuff kind of automatically. And maybe let me get back to like knowing what the temperature is from time to time.

That'd be good. Wow. We don't care. We don't care. Like I honestly, I don't. Well, what you're describing is what Josh A.I. Launch their company on. Well, I mean, it's more like HomeKit, too.

Like, it just shows you like the top level things of what you. Yeah, but Josh A.I. is actually, like, figuring stuff out for, like, ways to make your house work better, and that's not happening in HomeKit. HomeKit is entirely manual, every little thing. The interface into my home is all I need. I don't need anything more than HomeKit. I don't need anything to be a grand overture sent to me as an interface.

I just need to know the temperature and how to turn lights on and off, and that's it. Like, I just need it to work and be reliable. don't need anything else. I think what we learned this year is that all roads lead to home assistant because even the professional systems are relying on home assistant at this point. And it just all needs to be based on home assistant. That is the platform. That's an interesting dichotomy. The statement that you just made versus what Seth made, what's says saying, Seth saying, I need something that's like less visible and just kind of works in the background. That's

never been home assistant. Home assistant is the is the tinkerer's wet dream, right? So it's trying to now serve multiple audiences with this same core product. And I think that's what is finding and what we're finding a bit challenging. Well, if we're going to argue on user interface, I would argue that home assistant has never been the home interface or user interface for home automation, right? Because you have to go out of your way to make an interface for it.

And so you're relying on. for everything else. I think there's a couple different ways you to look at that. But the smart home, just being able to do things with AI is really the ultimate goal there. And that way nobody thinks about it. And we'll have to see who gets there first. Everybody's struggled to get there so far. Yep. I'm glad we're kind of all talking about the same thing because we've been on one person's prediction so far

for the last 10 minutes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's it. I don't use Home Assistant for anything other than the backing glued home assistant's not exposed to anyone in my family in any way shape or form so it and it is not trying to be the central um hub in my house like it's not so I think there's a way that that it can proceed that way and if they they play their cards right I think that's that's the best way for them to go honestly just be the glue be the glue guys all right uh who we on now richard are we on Gavin we're at Gavin I was going to skip him I feel like we already talked

about everything I wanted to say because my last year prediction was, you know, the mainstream integration of AI with the smart home. And I think we kind of did that with the introduction again of Alexa Plus and the Google Gemini integration.

Well, hold on a stretch. They introduced it and they rolled it out to some people whether they know they have it or not, but it's there now, right? And the next step, I guess we could talk, well, it's not in my prediction. But the next step, I think, is what Seth's looking for is it's just there. It monitors stuff and it just does it for you, right?

So I think we've started the, we've started, you know, and I'd like to see where it goes from there. Okay, well, how do you meddle? Because I'm sorry, but you can't win gold on a technicality. I don't think mainstream has integrated AI at all. And if we look at like what, like, even. Well, it's in Alexa. Is Alexa not mainstream? I mean, allegedly, it's in.

Siri too, but... Well, no, it's not in Siri. It's not in Siri. But it's in Alexa as AI. It's in Google Gemini as AI. Whether people are not using it or not, that wasn't my argument. I was just saying it was being increasing.

But is it useful for anything smart home related? It is actually. That's a thing. I'm not understanding some people's arguments here because I was, you know, I was always getting mad because I can call something blinds. And the old Alexa, if I didn't call it blinds, It had no idea, but the new Alexa, I could say blind shades, I could say, whatever, it knows the window coverings, open or close them, right?

So that kind of AI there is smarter and it's getting better and even the wife's using it more, right? She's, she's using it more, right? TJ said this on the show last week and I don't think you picked up on. He says, did they really need AI for that? And the answer is no. No, I understand, yes. But having the AI, having the AI asked her. said, can I call it whatever?

She said, yeah, you can call it whatever, you know. And even when I refer to certain devices, she's smarter to say, oh, you're talking about this device. Let me turn on this. I don't have to say the room name and everything like that. So it's gotten smarter. Whether or not it needed AI, I don't know the back-end programming of it at all and stuff like that, right?

But it's still much better. I think my feature counts, I think if you look at what Google did with the Gemini stuff by putting it in the way they implemented it in their ecosystem, I don't use this, I don't know how it works, but that looks like more of what I would consider a gold medal for what Gavin's arguing Alexa Plus for here. I think Google, with the way they did the programming, you can ask it to do something and it sets up the programming, little bubble balloon things. Like that is, that's more alongside of what I would expect AI to look like in the smart home. So, I mean, I think he gets it, Richard, on a technicality. I'm going to get the gold.

Hold on a technicality. I'm saying bronze. I'm saying bronze, too. I don't think we need to talk about Richards, though, because is there something lower than bronze? It's called not meddling. So, yeah, my prediction... We'll give Gavin the silver there.

My prediction was that Apple will make an AI move with HomeKit. And that clearly did not happen because Apple learned that AI is a lot harder than just giving slick demos. So they have really been having to go back to the drawing board in how they're approaching AI in their assistant and where they're using it because what they promised did not come. Now, granted, their assistant is better.

It can do more things. It can send some stuff to chat GTP and do that. But none of that has anything to do with a smart home. It hasn't really done any of the local stuff that they were talking about where you could say, hey, where are we going? Where are Nancy and I going for lunch again? And it would know to look in your text messages to find the answer to that or, you know, can you turn that, you know, just say something like turn the remaining lights off or just something that's off the formula. It still can't do that. So, yeah, I didn't meddle.

I did not get any grade if we're using. medals this year. So I will pass to Seth. Nope. Before we say that, isn't this? Participation Award. To keep things moving was the next words out of my mouth. Fine. We don't do that here. Yeah, what I'll do is I'll give you the do not finish, but we will give you the participation trophy here for our emojis. So there you go.

Oh, thank you. Everybody gets a trophy. We don't want anybody's hurt feelings. I love this generation. Thank you. All right. I have no idea looking at one of my predictions. You just did everything. I just did everything, yeah. I said DIY more integrations with Matter or Home Assistant.

I guess. Sure. I have seen more day one integrations. Like, we've seen more new stories come out and say, we work with Matter. We work with Home Assistant. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely.

Pro, I guess I'm going to get myself the gold in this pro one. I said, pro, anyone guess? Like, manufacturer's still trying to figure out what to do. And I really feel that's the same situation. I have not seen any movement in the pro space at all whatsoever. And the only thing that's happened is mergers and acquisitions, which means the market is just shrinking, so they have to have fewer companies.

Not a good sign, but there it is. And then also the prediction was AI AI Everywhere, which is definitely something that happened, but not really. Not the way we wanted. That's pretty much the rabbit's foot wish of AI. Because we, the monkeys paw, I guess, where the finger went down and we did not get the wish we wanted the way we wanted it. Oh, well. But I don't know.

What do you guys say? I mean, when you guess 20 things, you're not getting one of them, right? I guess you get a silver then. Oh, you have to split it. Right. So silver. All right. Silver it is.

All right. And then, TJ, what's you got? I said robots. Last year we started to see robot lawnmowers take off and become mainstream. What else can we robot? I would say this is true, right? I mean, so for the longest time, we've always seen these humanoid robots that have been everywhere, and a lot of them have been fake.

I think it's like the Tesla humanoid robot was, you know, somebody wearing it in the end. But we've seen some other companies, mainly in China, come out with actual humanoid robots. That supposedly work. You know, it's one of those things that we don't actually know about until a couple of years from now if it's real or not. But we've seen robot vacuums and mops become substantially cheaper, for example. I picked up a Ufi robot mop and vacuum. I think it was like $600 normal.

And I got it for like two or $300 bucks. So that was very cheap and something I've been holding off on. But we've also seen other things like driverless cars really take shape and move to other cities. and a bunch of other robots. So I think this one's a gold. What about you guys? Gold. Did you get your pre-order in for your neo-human robot?

Oh, hell no. Sorry, I read I-Robot. I'm, I'm, no, no, no human-eyed robots in my home. Nope, not. They'll figure it out. They'll figure it out. Not happening. Isn't that the one where it's like run by a person like in the background?

That's where they're going to start. Yeah, it's like a remote session basically. Yeah. I'm good on that. Exactly what I want in my house. Yeah, right, exactly. Nope, no, no. Yeah, you had totally gold here.

And it was such a big deal. Robotics was such a big deal this year that one of the three episodes Adam and I had of the smart home show this year was about home robotics. So there you go. Yeah, and it was all over the place at CES last year. So I can only imagine it's going to be worse this year with like three more. pool robot companies that nobody's ever heard of. I'm excited to see what they do with the robot vacuums that have the creepy little arms. Because of CES last year, we saw all the robots of the little tiny little baby arms

that would pick up your socks or the toys and move them out of the way. And they were so creepy-looking. I'm excited to see what happens with those this year. More creepy-looking. Yeah, also they didn't work. So I'm predicting some of the manufacturers will remove them. Bigger arms. Oh, remove them.

I want like a legit human arm that comes out I don't want that little rinky ding piece of plastic I want a legit arm I was at a Microsoft event in San Fran and I was shocked at how many robots they actually had there they had nothing to do with what we were there for but they had those little they had those little dog robots

and they had like a coffee making robot and stuff like that and it was really cool to see but when I was in the airport they actually had a robot arm making a coffee vending machine with a robot arm that made it for you And I sat there just watching that thing, and yeah, it's popular. That's a slick device, actually.

That's a really slick device. And, you know, there's no reason why it has to be a, it has to look like a robot's arm, right? They're doing that because they want it for the wow factor. And robots can't unionize. I mean, there's that, too. Not yet. But it's a cool vending machine. It really is.

Call me when the robot dogs can make coffee. Yeah, yeah. All right. But DJ, you get the only gold this year. So good prediction. And that's going to move us on to what are our smart home predictions for next year. What are we going to look into the smart home crystal ball that we have and see what's going to happen next year? Adam, you're up first.

I'm just going to repeat mine from last year. And one of these years, it's going to be right. So I'm going for the gold. But yeah, I think kind of to get back to our AI. discussion, I think one of the things that is going to help make AI actually useful, and Richard's probably going to hate this, is I think the AI paradigm we haven't seen yet is dynamically generated UI that just shows us what we need to see, when we need to see it. And I haven't seen this done well yet, but I think this is one of the things that will be

useful in the smart home is like all right you arrived home and you want to do something like present me with the useful options that makes sense in this scenario like so like an advertisement you mean like i'm i'm from amazon amazon standard like that's what you want would you like to see an ad i want ads on all my smart appliances no i'm thinking like you know um what makes sense in this scenario you know I'm in the kitchen, only show me controls that apply to the kitchen. You know, it's this time of day, only show me things that makes sense for that time of day. So I think that is going to be what's going to kind of start to get some of the stuff rolling. And maybe what helps bring, you know, like a matter or something like that to be actually useful is when, you know, somebody can put the right software layer on top of it.

to, you know, start to really help people, you know, use these things effectively. Yeah, I don't hate it at all. I think it's brilliant. I think it's going to happen. I think of this as kind of dynamic or smart focus modes in your home interface, right? I feel like Apple's kind of already playing with this concept in their recommendations for what should end up on the homepage of your. your home app, and the way they overload terms just kills me. But the ability to just have the relevant stuff based on your patterns, that's the killer

app right there. Yeah, unfortunately, I think we're going to get the ads first, but, you know, I could be wrong. As long as they're relevant ads. Dynamic ads, there we go. It kind of brings me into my predictions. AI will not be useful in any way whatsoever in this market. home. And I'm doing this intentionally. I really want to lose this, this prediction next year, but I'm just not seeing the steps made that need to be made for things like what Adam's talking

about to be, to be in place. Like, they just want to serve your ads. And I don't get it. So I'm really hoping to be wrong next year, but I don't know. I really don't have much faith in the way the current tech leaders have approached what they're doing with AI in any way shape or form. So, yeah, I'm down. I'm bearish on AI this year. And, you know, prove me wrong. I would love to be proved wrong. Understandable. Yeah. All right, Richard.

All right. So at CES, which we're all going to be attending very shortly, I predict we will see Ring announce something amazing and it'll never come to market. Gold right there. I'll give you a gold from now. You can just take it, yeah. Is he going to fly around your house? Okay, so I'm kind of joking

because that doesn't meet the smart test. It's not measurable, but because there's no way, like how long would it take to bring it to market? It's not always in the same year. No, in all honesty, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see the ring drone come out. I think they will actually get this out. Um, this is, I believe that with Jamie gone, Jamie Semenoff, the founder of Ring was gone from

Amazon for a couple of years doing his own thing with his big money that he made and, um, and not doing great at it. So he came back to Amazon and he is back in the seat. And I think that, uh, that product lost steam without someone having some vision and someone with some clout in the company really driving that brand. So I think it's very possible that we will see that thing come out. As far as I'm aware, they haven't put out any official announcement that they're killing it.

So we'll see. We'll see what happens. And Richard's going to buy one on day one because he loves cameras in his house? I mean, I am actually very interested in this. The design is such that when it is at rest, the camera is physically shielded and not, not usable. So the idea that when you're not at home, now, you know, there's all kinds of issues

that they could be dealing with to solve for here. All homes are different. There's liability issues they could be concerned about. They have to deal with the possibility of pets or maybe someone who's not detected in the home. I mean, there's a lot that they would have to work through to make this possible. So it doesn't shock me that it would take years to get it out.

I hope you're correct because honestly I really want this product to become a real thing. I do think it's a good idea, especially depending on how much it costs. Because depending on the size of your house and how it's laid out and everything like that, you might need, you know, three to ten cameras depending on what you're actually trying to watch. You know, so I think it is a good idea. It'll be interesting to see if they actually iron out all the issues with it Because I'm assuming that's why they never released it, right? Because just like you said, there's a lot of trouble and a lot of issues with flying a drone around inside your house.

Yep. No matter whose house it is. Absolutely. Can we touch on the pets? Like, is there a prop bet that we can make on this to see how many dogs destroy these things as they're flying through the air? Or how many dogs like absolutely are terrified by this thing that's just making bumblebee sounds throughout a house? like I don't see this like this is going to get introduced if it ever sees the light of day past what is his name jassy who just like slashes everything that's going on at Amazon and not I mean I mean you got to look at it like yeah he's back but there's a new boss in town and and he doesn't let them play the way they used to play with with Bezos in charge so I don't know I just I don't see this as being a good product ever and I don't see it if it is the market I'm just curious as to people who get this and find out their dog is, you know, fainting in the corner or something

when this thing goes off. I just don't see torturing pets as a good thing. I don't get it. You're worried about dogs. I have two cats, and one of the cats would 100% attack this thing. Right. And be able to jump up at it. I think they're going to recommend that you not use this if you have pets in your home.

I think that there's all kinds of problems that you could have there. And that might also shield them from significant liability issues. Yeah. All right. Well, TJ, what's you got? Oh, my guess for 2026 is that home assistant will become mainstream. And what I mean by this, right, is because there's not that many smart home hubs anymore. We've really narrowed them down.

You basically have Alexa. I wouldn't really count Google at this point because I don't know what they're doing. They're doing nothing. what uh apple home they've released jemini whatever they have no other products uh home kit home kit is basically dead at this point it will never die because apple will just include it with their phone it's not dead yet but they they've had they've had no big updates to that platform either uh and so what you're you're stuck with you're stuck with smart things which is basically running on other people's hardware at this point that's basically dead hubatat and home assistant

and wink wink is still there somewhere refrigerator yeah And the homie, homies Yeah, homie is there. We'll have to see how that goes with LG purchasing them. And LG's trying to get their one hub out. They're launching it overseas. Was it thing Q or is it something else? Yeah, the think Q1 hub.

Yeah. But anyway, home assistant, I think no matter who you are, at this point, home assistant has become easier to set up and easier to manage. And they've been pushing recently to create products that people can just plug in and use. And I don't think your grandma is going to go and buy a home assistant hub, but somebody that buys a house and they just want to control some lights may actually look at home assistant at this point because it integrates with everything and it's

become a lot easier. I still think they need like an easy, medium, and hard mode before this really takes effect. But I think home assistance can become mainstream. It's funny when you said that the two people, the Gavin just like, nope, I'm like, no, it's just not going to happen. We'll just put the bronze here now. And just go ahead and set you down as a digital award. You don't get bronze for a no.

No. I'm sorry. So, so negative. We'll see. We'll see. I would be betting against this one. Geez, already count me out. I still think they need to solve the interface for it, and they're a few years away from that alone.

See, but I'm going to go back to what Seth said. I don't think the interface is important anymore. For the longest time, my hang-up for Home Assistant was the interface. But at this point, everybody is using voice assistants and some other platforms where they're just going to use Home Assistant as the glue. And I think that is really where Home Assistant's going. They're going to continue to do stuff with the user interface. But I think for the vast majority of people, they just want to use voice control or they want to like tie it into HomeKit or something else that's really simple and they could just use it on their phone. I'll give you a measurable for this.

We will give you a placing metal if there is some sort of. of product for home assistant, some sort of home assistant bridge product available in a Best Buy. Ooh, yeah, that would be my measurable. That would be mainstream. If that, if this has come true. I'll take it. Okay.

How about this? Can I add a qualifier out there? If we see products that the average consumer can buy that has a tag on there that says works with home assistant. No. No, they're doing that today. I mean, yeah, but they're not putting it on the physical product, though. Yeah.

Yeah, there. Yeah, they are. Are they putting on the physical product? I've only seen, I've only seen that online. Like, it works with home assistant. No, no, no, no. I haven't seen that at Best Buy. I can't go to, like, get a light switch from Best Buy.

This says Works with Home Assistant. No, you, yes, there's stuff coming out with works with on the system on the box. All right. At Best Buy. I need to go there tomorrow. I swear. I don't hang out in Best Buy that often. I don't go there often.

All right. We'll find out next year. Yeah, is it on the only online thing. I think it truly mainstream would be something that you, you pick up. in Best Buy that had that like if you picked up a home assistant was it it's not the gold anymore green or green or yellow if there was a new home assistant blue and it was in Best Buy and we don't mean only available online yeah you have to be able to go into the store I'm fine with it's going to look like a toilet paper roll holder or something it's got to look it's going

to look pretty they're going to get confused of what section of Best Buy it's going to go into is this housewares I don't know all right Gavin Gavin Gavin what's your prediction I think this is going to be a big year for the robot lawnmores. And I think it's just going to settle this year. I think I feel like they've been going through transition. It's the same way the robot vacuums were going through it. You know, you had the wall bumpers at first, and then you went from there and now LIDAR and everything, and they've gotten a lot better. And I think this year, they're going to introduce more with LIDAR, and it's going to be much better. And then it will hopefully settle. Prices are going to drop. And maybe I'll see somebody else in my neighborhood

by one, you know, and I'm not the only one having to answer all the questions. That's what I'm hoping for. I think after this year, it will be a matter of them just trying to figure out other things like how do you do trimming or add extra features, like maybe identifying weeds and pulling them out. Who knows? But that will be the different. Hold on.

Yeah, yeah. That will be the things that the companies will use to differentiate themselves at that point. But, you know, we've been through the wire bearing phase. We're at the RTK phase. we're coming into the LIDAR phase. Maybe a combination of LIDAR and RTCA will be the sweet spot. But I think they'll figure that. We'll see some big announcements this year.

You know, you get things like four-wheel drive making a difference, you know, adjusting the height, which is only in some of them that may become the norm now. So I just think this year will be a big year for the robot Lamours. I think more of them need to solve the fence problem because that's for me, you know, Like, I pay for a lawn service, and so there's an economic equation to this, but, you know, I also have a dog. So at some point, you got to solve. And some of the higher-end ones do have solutions for this, but I don't think it's a solved problem for the most part. And to clarify, you're really talking about the gate problem, right?

Right. Like, you have a gate at a fence and the robot's not going to be able to open it. So how do you address that? Robot hands, robot hands. That's right. Yeah, yeah, robot hands. I've seen some companies mention that they were looking into creating a little gate that will open and close to let them more through and stuff. But I haven't seen anything come out since they were all looking at it.

And that would be, that's huge right there too, I agree. I know Huscavarner has something like this that's sort of like a smart doggie door that only the robot can go through. That's the only one I've seen that has something that kind of solves this problem. But like even that's not super simple because then you also have to like install it. or you're like cutting into your gate or your fence or it's it's just complicated so i think some of those type of things are what it's going to take to get there and then um you know i think then you'll start to see you know as the economics you know the price come down and it becomes easier to use then at some point people are going to just do the math and say it doesn't make

sense for me to either pay somebody else to do this or you know um or you know their lawnmour breaks And they, you know, just kind of like what we said about Best Buy is like when you start to see these things show up in your local hardware stores so that when the, you know, the lawnmower breaks and they go to, we have Ace here, you know, Home Depot or Lowe's. And instead of buying a new lawnmower, you're going to pick this up, I don't think you're there yet, but I don't, I don't hang out in hardware stores much. They're close to that actually. Yeah, they're, they've got the boxes and the weights and everything under where they need. to be for Home Depot. So they're close to doing that if they're not already in some home depots. But yeah, we're close to seeing these becoming. You know what? One of the things when we were talking to Jennifer Pattison Tuey, when we had her on the show, she mentioned that

a lot of the reasons we're seeing these things pop up now is because all the patents expired for Husqvarna. And that has just opened the floodgates to all of these other companies to go out to make robot lawnmowers. And like, oh, that makes total sense. Because it was, it was for a while, we saw Husqvara and I just kind of undo nothing. I mean, they did make some things. But they were kind of cursed with products, like batteries and things that weren't all that great or they were very expensive.

Now the, the battery technology has gotten a lot less expensive. All the, like, RTK, GPS, all that stuff is built into phones. And they're benefiting from like the, what is it called the, when your manufacturer has like the abundance of product to choose from. They're benefiting from all that. So we're seeing the, like Gavin said, the prices come down and be reasonable and the technology lasts a little bit longer.

When we talked to Wayne, I think he said what, since last like three to five years or something like that. Which is not great in the grand scheme of things. I have a lawnmour that I bought when I moved in. And it's probably dead now because I can't get it to start very much anymore. But that's a 10-year, 10-year investment

that I probably spent $200 at home Depot line. If we can get robot lawnmowers into that space, I think that would be for most people. I think, Gavin, what you're going to see, though, I think you're going to see, like, companies, like lawnmowing companies set these up in people's yards first. I think they're going to be the front line of this. I'm already seeing that, actually. I can order them. And just on Adams note, if I go to Home Depot, Canada, they have the man-motion ones on their website, but they're not in store. They don't get any store space. But you get that. them deliver to the store, deliver to your home if you want. So we're getting close to that.

To what you said, I had a friend who was in the landscaping business and he sort of was starting to experiment with that idea of like, um, sort of lawn mowing as a service that involved the deployed robot. And I think it was really just too early and too expensive. Um, but I actually think that's a great idea. And like to really, you're still going to want somebody to do edging and trimming and weeds and you know mulch and things like that and so heck maintain the lawnmore it's not it is a job to like go out there every couple weeks at least here in florida and and rotate out the six blades you got to take off the stupid thing and i've got to have them like all that stuff no one wants to do i can tell you yeah uh so and then then the people won't even buy it it's just going to live

at their house and you know and the company will deal with it i actually think that'll be or somebody that figures that out well is going to make a ton of money. But, yeah, it's just a matter of when it's ready for that. Yeah, one of the reasons I bought a robot lawnmower is because the price came down so much. I had bought a gas mower when I first moved into the house, and it was not very good. It didn't have, like, self-propell and all that good stuff. And so I went to go buy an electric mower because I really like my electric lawn tools. And by the time I bought the batteries and the lawnmower and everything else, it was, you know,

$800 to $1,000. And I just looked at it at that point. I'm like, well, I might I'll just buy a robot lawnmower. And that's what I did instead. I hired the neighbor to mow the front yard, so I don't have to deal with that part. But it does the backyard by itself. It doesn't, and I go out there once a month, or once every two weeks, depending on what we're doing outside, and I weed whack around the edges.

And I've only done that because the price has come down significantly, and I think that'll keep happening. Very nice. Yeah, the one I want is the Yarboe that also does snow and, you know, a bunch of other things that thing's a beast but um a little pricey and and it's like a mini tank so i would also need a place to put it but um you know that idea where it has more than one use it's not just a lawnmower um you know then and can keep up with the snow and stuff like that too um definitely would be useful yeah one thing is they're not getting any smaller so if you think they're big now

the ones that are coming out they're going to get bigger they just keep getting bigger and bigger and That's fine. I'll just have a shed in the back corner of my lawn. That'll be the robot shed. Exactly. All right, all right. I think that's going to wrap up to the predictions here. Well, let's move on to the promotion zone.

Gavin, where can people find you? Well, if you're on, you know, Macedon, I'm on Gavin Campbell on hometech. com. You can hook up. That's probably the one place I probably interact with the most. And if you're on X, it's just. GVN Campbell. I'm on there.

He can hit me up there as well. Yeah, Richard. All right. So, as I mentioned before, Adam and I co-hosts the Smart Home Show. We get episodes out occasionally, so you can find stuff there at smarthome.fm. And I am on Mastodon as Richard Gunther.

I'm also on Blue Sky, Richard Gunther.com. There was already a Richard Gunther there. I can't believe that. Miss that one. But I am no longer. on X, I was never on X. Actually, I left Twitter when it started becoming a hellscape from a hellscape of a hate. So I, yeah, find me on MasterDem. Yeah, it's nicer there. DJ, where can they find you? You can always find me at hometech.fm. We talk there once a week. It doesn't always get released once a week, but we talk once a week. Or you can find me at my personal site, huddleston. Bio, where I'll have links to all my companies and everything else I do. Adam. Yeah, as Richard mentioned, you can find the smart home show at smarthome.fm.

And I don't think Richard even knows this because we haven't recorded it a while. I'm done with X now, too. I finally had enough. I was over it. So mainly, I'm not really on much, but I guess mainly on threads and Instagram these days at Adam, AM Justice. And go check out the rebooter pro at connectsense.com, or you can buy that thing on Amazon. It's very cool product. And I, uh, you can usually catch me mostly weekly, sometimes biweekly or try, who knows?

It could be any time that it's, it's just, it'll show up in your feet over at hometech.com. You'll see, you'll see a show up. I don't know, I don't know. Some, most of the time I'm editing shows. I have no idea. Uh, but you can catch me on social. I'm usually at, on our Macedon, Seth at home tech.com. Uh, you can, you can find me there. Uh, and I think that's it. Yeah, I don't, I don't do the Twitter thing anymore. I, I've, I've been off that for a while. So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, mostly, uh, I'm mostly happy with the home tech. Social thing and it's, it's got a good feed that I can flow through and nice people over there.

The only reason I'm on X is because work people use it. Yeah. Things I have to follow for work and they will not move. And I have to have to be up to date with what they're doing. Just get that LinkedIn like TJ has. You'll be doing. Oh my God. That's even worse.

Oh, man. LinkedIn is like the worst social network platform. It's not a social network. Oh, it is. It is. Repository. That's how people treat it, though. All right, all right. I think it's going to wrap up everything here. Thank you so much for joining us for the 11th annual Technology.coms fireside chat. Check out everybody's, the podcast, everybody's doing. And I guess we'll see you next year. Everybody have a great 2026. Happy New Year and happy holidays. We'll see you next year. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Take care. Till next time.

Thank you.