The Vergecast - Does smart home tech work in a college dorm?

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

It can be hard enough to set up smart home tech in a house or an apartment, but what about a dorm room? Jennifer Pattison Tuohy recently tested out some smart home tech when she dropped off her son for his freshman year at Clemson. Jen reports back to David Imel on how the gadgets stood up to the challenges of college Wi-Fi and rules against hanging things on the wall. Further reading: Apple’s new M6 chip gets more cores and more AI compute Apple’s new Mac Mini has fresh M6 and M5 Pro chip offerings — and higher prices Apple launches new Mac Studios with its ‘most powerful chip ever’ — the M5 Ultra Android is getting its own weird dots to cure car sickness WhatsApp is making it easier to ignore spam calls Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of sending your kids to college. I'm David Emel, another David, filling in for David Pierce here and there while he's away. He's actually out contributing to society while I remain a childless cat man. Today on the show, we're talking to the Verge's senior smart home reviewer Jennifer Patterson-Tooey about something a lot of parents are dealing with right now sending their kids to college. But of course, Jen being Jen, she wanted to set her son's dorm room up with the same smart home stuff that he's been using. for the last 18 years. So I'm going to be asking her how that went and what her recommendations are for other parents that are sending their kids to college and might want to make it a little more

intelligent than most dorm rooms are on a day-to-day basis. But first, here's what's happening on the verge today. This is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. Today, Apple surprisingly dropped a bunch of new hardware on us, including a new Mac Mini with the all-new M6 and M5 Pro chip sets and higher prices. The cheapest Mac Nini now starts at $899 of $300 from the very well-priced M-M-4 Mac Mini was started at just $599. And if you want the M5 Pro Chip, that's going to start at $1699, almost double that price. The M6 is Apple's first 2-nometer chip set, and Apple says it should bring improvements in

performance and power efficiency alongside a dual 16-core neural engine for AI workloads. Apple also dropped the new M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips sets in its Macs Studio. and says the M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever. The M5 Ultra starts at 96 gigabytes of RAM, and Apple's cleaning up to 4.3 times faster AI compute tasks. Alongside these upgrades, Apple also made one other pretty major announcement. A new polishing cloth starts at $9 instead of $19. It's pretty much the same thing, just cheaper.

Android's getting a new motion assist feature, which uses moving dots on your screen to help avoid car sickness. Apple launched a similar feature in 2024, and the feature is going to be rolling out to Android 17 devices in phases with some pixel phones getting the feature first. And finally, WhatsApp users on Android are now going to see more information about colors that aren't in their contacts, like what country the number is calling from and if you have any groups in common.

You can also now add passwords for two-factor verification and multiple pass keys for both Android and iOS devices. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. How many third-party vendors does your company use? 20, 200? Thanks to AI, someone on your team probably added three more this week. And your security lead has no idea.

Traditional third-party risk management can't keep up. Vanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor automatically, so you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. AI on, risk off. Vanta.com slash TPRM. How many third-party vendors does your company use? 20, 200. Thanks to AI, someone on your team probably added three more this week.

And your security lead has no idea. Traditional third-party risk management can't keep up. Vanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor, automatically, so you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. A-I-on, risk-off. Vanta.com slash T-P-R-M. Jen, welcome back to the Vergecast. Hello, David.

So nice to be here with you on your inaugural episode. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Before we get started into the smart home dorm stuff, your son's off to his first year in college right now. We heard you on the Vergecast a few days ago talking about Alexa and Gemini and asking for advice on how to handle that.

So how does that been going for you? Well, I don't. I don't generally take the advice of the AI. That was more just for a demo. But it was, you know, it was kind of interesting what it had to say, which was the piece of advice I hear from a lot of people, which is you just got to let them fly. Don't check it on them, and that's been the hardest part.

I have Life 360. But in general, it's been a really fun experience for all of us. The whole of the Vergecast is all about babies right now, whereas I'm letting my baby fly off. So I'm at the other end of the spectrum from the rest of the staff looking at their exciting news with fond memories, but every stage of your kid's life is so much fun. And I have to say, this one has been one of the most exciting.

And for a smart home reviewer, moving into a new room, a new dorm, new space was like, I'm a kid in a candy store. get to try new things, try things, you know, that I probably wouldn't have done in my own home. And also, he'd been in his room since he was six. So we'd never really done like a complete makeover. And this was an exciting, exciting time for both of us. Yeah, I imagine there's a big difference between having a room since he was six, that you were just retrofitting with things as they came out, and then taking the state of the art and just completely building out. a room with what we have available today.

Yeah, I know. It was a really fun experiment for me, especially as I often get asked questions around, like, smart home devices for renters or smart home devices for smaller spaces or apartments. And, you know, I live in a single family home and I've not had a lot of experience in those spaces. So it was great for me to be able to try out a new space. It was kind of like a dorm room, like extreme makeover because I had like two hours and I had no idea what I was going to do or what was going to work because I hadn't even really seen the space.

So it was like, you know, I was like one of the property brother twins, you know, just given a box of things in a room and go like, go. Yeah. Yeah. Was your son mostly on board with you kidding out his dorm room? He was. He was excited. He has never been a huge, like I must have this smart tech. But I think that's also because it's just been around him.

his entire life. And he, you know, it's sort of just part of things. A light switch that doesn't, that he doesn't need to use a switch. He just uses his voice as just the way it's always been. I've made this joke before on the Vergecast, but this actually happened again, which made me laugh. So the very first time he went away from home, he went to Clemson, which is where he's at college now,

for a tennis camp, and he was, I think, 14 or 15. And so he took him to a dorm. They were staying in dorms for the week, and they handed him a key, and I walked down to the dorm with his stuff, and he went to, like, looked at the key and looked at the door and looked at me. How do we use this archaic technology? I've never used one of these before. To be fair, even in 2013, when I was in college, they had key cards for our dorm rooms, so. Okay, so it wasn't, yeah, he wasn't completely unusual. And his new dorm room does have a key, and he went to use the key.

he knew how to use the key, to be clear. It just wasn't working. But yeah, they use their phones. Their student pass and their door key, everything is on their phone. So, yeah, he just used his phone to, it has like the reader. It's like a reader you would use to get into your office, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it started off smart. So he was happy to continue.

But we were kind of limited. And like I said, I didn't know what we're going to be able to do. So I just kind of like, piled a whole bunch of gear that I was thinking this might work. And then like I said, I had my sort of stopwatch and let's go. Where's, where's roommates kind of down for you to kid it all out? Yes, they were. So his roommate is his best friend since second grade. So his roommate, I'm totally used to all of this stuff. The main thing that was the most important thing for both of them. And I think really the most interesting part for any kind of

dorm room is, was lighting, was the smart lighting. Because, I mean, the dorm rooms, this may be different in colleges across the country, but I'm guessing not. Two fluorescent lights. Spotty fluorescent lights from the ceilings. Yep, yep. Nothing that you want to be working in for sure. No, just miserable. Like, I think we have some before and after pictures, but you can see like what it look like before all brightly lit. I mean, it's definitely like keep you awake. But also not, I mean, there's so much about lighting that does affect your mood and have been able to change that mood from like bright and light in the morning when you're getting ready to sort of a good light for studying to sort of wind down mode, that circadian rhythm. That, you know, that is all

really important, especially when you're doing, you're making such a big change in your life going from living at home, going to high school, to being independent, living on your own in college, to have something that just kind of helps you feel better, I think, was really, I mean, I don't think he viewed it that way. I think he viewed it more like, RGB lighting, cool. But for me, I was like, this just feels like a nice place to be. And they only have one window, and it's like in the corner of the room, so there was really no natural lighting. Just like my apartment. He's just like me. Just like me. Yeah, we should note that When smart home stuff was first coming onto the market, the number one thing was always the smart lighting.

And it seems that that is still people's biggest desire when it comes to smart home equipment. Now, my question here is a lot of the Wi-Fi networks at colleges have weird, like, captive portals and things like that. Did you experience any sort of strange setup issues that you wouldn't have at an actual regular home, you know? Well, so I haven't completely finished. I would say this out front because, like I said, I got there with no idea what I was going to face. I knew they had Wi-Fi, but I didn't know whether I would be able to connect any of the devices. And I wasn't able to do any Wi-Fi connection while I was there. However, we've since discovered, and I think it wasn't up and running yet was one of the reasons,

that the university has three separate Wi-Fi networks. They have one for you to connect your computers to. Okay. And then they have one for you to connect like a guest network. And then they have one specifically for media devices. And that's so like if you want to set up a streamer device or an smart speaker, those types of things. And that required, you had to like log the URL, not the URL, the Mac ID of all the devices you wanted with the university. It's like, this is not something I'm going to be doing in two hours.

No. And I kind of knew that that was going to be the case. It was going to, Wi-Fi was going to be an issue. So I kind of went into this with, I don't want to have to rely on Wi-Fi. I want to set this room up so that it can be completely controlled without using Wi-Fi, which was a challenge. And I was excited to try that out and see if I could surmount that challenge. Because also, in the smart home, in my smart home, even though you don't need the internet for a lot of, locally controlled devices. You do need a land. You do need a local area network, some form of

Wi-Fi for the communication. And so, and I didn't have that as an option. There were Ethernet ports in the room and we plugged his, he has a gaming PC and we plugged it in. It was 935 gigabytes. I was like, oh, okay, you're good. I think it'll be fine. So a gigabit internet in his dorm room. Okay. I was surviving off of like one megabit. So that's That's pretty amazing. I have to ask, David, before we dive in more onto my son's dorm, what was your dorm like? Because I think dorms have changed quite a lot.

You know, it's funny, I went to school in Santa Cruz, which is right in the heart of Silicon Valley. And we still had terrible. It was not built up. I'm sure Stanford or something would have been nice. But we had one Wi-Fi network that didn't work half the time, and you really had to go to the computer lab to get anything done. But, you know, I was also very, didn't have a lot of money. So I was working off an old Dell display.

But yeah, yeah, definitely not smart. Smart Home stuff was brand new at the time. So, and if that really. So what else besides the lighting did you guys want to install in this storm? There were a few things that we'd kind of earmarked beforehand that I wanted. I wanted him to have a smart speaker. Eventually, I'm hoping we'll be able to get that connected. But I also wanted to be his alarm clock.

So I went with what is probably my favorite smart alarm clock. option, which is the Amazon Echo Spot, because it doesn't have a big screen, which can be distracting, and also if it's an echo device, we'll show you an ad if it has a big screen. And then it has, but it does have the time and you can, you know, you can have some manual control of it to turn on and off and set things. So that was one thing I wanted him to have. And once we do get the Wi-Fi, if we do, the Wi-Fi step, he'll be able to use voice control. And it's also, All of the echo devices are matter controllers. So that's my next stage, if I get to spend another two hours, is I want to use local matter devices in the home.

And most everything I did set up can now connect, can connect to matter in the future when we get that the local area network going. The other thing I had heard from other mums was that the air quality in the dorms was pretty bad. That's true. That's generally true. Yeah. Yeah. So an air purifier was an important one. And the boys actually wanted that too. So that wasn't sort of something we had to convince them. I gave them a couple options of ones I wanted them to try. And they went with the kind of cool black one, which is a we love air purifier. It's a really good air purifier. And it's also matter compatible. But it has controls on it. So this was another key thing for me. I wanted everything that I put in the room to be able to be able to be. controlled either over Bluetooth using the phone or have actual physical devices because I didn't want his roommate to have to download apps to be able to turn things on and off.

To press some buttons, turn things on and off for sure. Yeah. So, and the We Love has really nice, clear controls on the top. And there's like a sleep mode you can just hit at night that turns the lights off. It also has cool, fun, RGB lighting on it, so which is something they both really wanted. Benefits you in college. Yeah. And for the listeners, the benefits. of matter for sure is that it's all local, correct? Like that's, yeah, that kind of gets around the college Wi-Fi issue a little bit. So that had been my thought, but because I couldn't even get on at all to any, so one thing, what I was thinking about doing, and then we will go back, like I said, I'm going to try and do the whole Mac ID route, but is there, I do have an Ethernet port, so I was

thinking I could just get like a small, inexpensive router and just set up. Set up your own network. Is that allowed at a lot of these colleges or did they not allow? That wasn't sure of it. Yeah, I hadn't dug into the TOS of the college internet yet and probably not. I said from the get-go, because there was a lot of unknowns variables. And to your point, you know, yeah, this college, he's actually, we didn't mention me, he's at Clemson University in South Carolina, has excellent Wi-Fi and Ethernet, but a lot don't.

And you may not want the load of some of these. devices on whatever system you're using, especially if, you know, you are using Wi-Fi for your work, that's the priority in college, right? The work. Yeah, not the hours of gaming laid into the night of avoiding your homework, no. I know. So, yeah, again, being able to control things locally, but yes, matter is a local area, can be used entirely locally without an internet connection for certain devices. It's up to the individual device manufacturer, how they set up their device, but that is sort of built into it that you should be able to control it locally on a local land. So there's also thread, which would be the option instead of Wi-Fi. But for that,

you need a threadboarder router, which also needs to connect to the internet. Although there are some thread devices that can just talk to each other, but the kind of devices we were setting up in his Smart dorm didn't really fit in that mold. He didn't need a lot of the kind of like sensors, door locks, that kind of stuff. And also thread lighting, I did think about thread lighting, but there just weren't a lot of options yet. And I really wanted to have that Bluetooth control. And we didn't mention this, but there were only two brands I could find that I knew

I could reliably set up and be able to control with an app to tell. turn on and off and change the color and change the tone. So to get that sort of, you know, that nice ambience, most smart lighting does need Wi-Fi. Even if it has Bluetooth, you still need Wi-Fi for any kind of control, even just directly through the app while you're in the room. The two brands that you can control locally over Bluetooth are Phillips Hugh, which was a little pricey for this setup.

And also they do have some newer, less expensive ones. But what he really wanted was the really fun colors and the kind of effects, really fun, RGB type effects. So we went with Govi, which is the other brand that also has complete local Bluetooth control. So he can just open the app. He's got three, we've got three devices set up right now. We have a floor lamp, a table lamp, and a light strip under his bed. So his bed's lofted. So the light strips under his bed.

and his desk is under his bed, so it kind of gives him like that soft light but over his workspace. Because the other big challenge is you can't stick things on walls in dorms. Right. They probably have very specific rules around that. Very much so. So how did you get that around? Did you just have to only use lamps and stuff that were standing on their own?

So lamps were the big key there. As long as you've got some outlets, big pro tip, take as many extension cords with you as you can. because there's so much you need to plug in. And I think I ended up leaving him with five separate extension cords. Wow. Yeah, so we did lamps. And then we also, he has like a salt lamp, which has color in it too. So, yeah, lamps were the best solution.

And then the only place we could put the light strips were under his lofted bed. But that worked well because then that's over his desk. And his desk now has light. Because that's the other downside of being under a lofted bed is you don't have any light, even from the overhead light. So yeah, once we had the Bluetooth set up, so now he can just open the app and hit one button off and all three lights will turn off

and one button on and they'll all turn on. And then he can change the colors. And you can also sync Govi devices to music. So he can do that with his phone. He can have one of the lights sort of flash while he's studying. Right. Considering he has a roommate,

does the roommate have access to all these things too through his apps? Yeah. So I told him to, I said, you can have him download the app if you wants, but he can also just, so they all have physical controllers. So you can just turn it off.

And will that sync to like all the devices, though, or just one at a time? No, because they're not networked, which they, you know, I said that would be my next step is to network them. No, you'd have to turn them off individually, you know, it's a hardship, but it's kind of like just using a light switch.

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Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. Are you guys using any smart plugs? Because that seems to be the other big category for people. That's what I want to do next because so the other really interesting challenge in this room was the lofted bed. So, you know, you don't have a bedside table. So I was like, how am I, how is he going to have like his alarm clock? And we also needed a light up there and a fan because it's South Carolina.

It's like 900 degrees here right now. And also, you know, his phone. So I actually, I came up with a really cute, I think this was a great solution. I did see it on TikTok, so I'm not taking credit for it. There is the dorm room makeover TikTok is a rabbit hole. You could spend a lot of time in if you want to go down it. There's some crazy stuff out there. But this was a great solution because you can't stick anything on the wall.

It was a suction mount for your car just suction to the wall. And then I got an extra long, like 10-foot USBC charger. Plug that in down underneath because obviously all the outlets are down on the ground floor. And so he can just put his phone. And I told him put it horizontally and it'll be in standby mode and it'll be just like your clock. right next to your head when you go to bed. Right. So that was my solution for the alarm clock up there.

And then he has another alarm clock. He has the spot down on the main level. But yeah, that worked out pretty well. And then we just clipped a little, like, inexpensive clip light on the side of the rail they have to make sure you don't fall off and break your neck. Right. Right. I had that as well. That was not new technology when I was in college.

But yeah, the smart plugs is a good one. I'm definitely going to try and, but you need the Wi-Fi or you need some kind of hub to connect to that. Right. We hadn't got that set up yet. Considering you had to have a lot of loopholes to get around all these college restrictions, do you think that companies should be making smart home stuff specifically for dorm rooms? It seems like a pretty open opportunity to me. Yeah, especially for this last couple of years, like it just seems to be people are spending a lot of money on their college dorm setups.

I think, I think, I'm not sure they really need to make a big change. I just, I do think the Bluetooth element really helps. I mean, I've always sort of poo-pooed using Bluetooth in the smart home because the range is bad. You know, if you leave the room, it no longer, you can no longer control it. But a dorm room is a space that is sort of uniquely designed for you to just to be using it when you're in it. You don't really need to control it in any way when you're not there, especially because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The key situation is already under the control of the university. You have your key there.

You don't need a smart lock or any sort of smart security. I did float the idea of cameras, but both of them said no. I'd probably say no to that too. I just was like, you know, maybe you could have one that you could turn on when you leave, just in case you're worried about any kind of security. But I did also float a doorbell. And this was a good solution. That's an interesting.

The Switchbot has a doorbell. So when someone presses the doorbell, it automatically shows up on the interior display. And you do not need to connect that to any internet. It's just communicating directly. And it can be battery powered, which again, not going to be wiring and doorbell in any dorm. I thought that was a good solution. And we did try that out. And he said, no one uses it.

And that is my experience with video doorbells in general. People just knock on the door. Yeah, it's not really. You're not saving a lot of time by, yeah. It's a strange innovation. But that also has a local SD card on it, so it could store recordings. But we weren't able to get that recording functionality set up without the Wi-Fi. But we were able to get it to set up so that you could just see.

So they can see who's at the front door and ignore them if they wanted to. Which in a college dorm you might not really be able to. But yeah. It can be hard. And of course, I did think about a robot vacuum because I'm like, my son does not use vacuum. It could be helpful, especially for a very small, very square space. Yeah, but they kind of, they were humming and hearing about that. So that's the next step.

Next time I, so I'm going back in like three weeks and I'm probably going to swap all this stuff out. But the problem I thought with a robot vacuum was that you really do have to look after it. It needs some maintenance and someone to sort of take ownership. And I could just imagine I would come back in three weeks and it would be under a bed with the, like seven cables sucked into it and dead. That would happen in my apartment too, for what it's worth. Did you have a robot vacuum in your apartment? I don't because I live in the cellar where the floors are super warped,

and there's no way it would just crash all the time. Well, we ended up going with a stick vac because that... That makes sense. It's simple, and, you know, they do have to clean their rooms. There's no one going to clean. They have to manually do it themselves, yeah. Do a little hard labor. Yeah.

So, and then, of course, A Bluetooth speaker was another thing that they both really wanted. Which one did you get for them? So a lot of the stuff I got for him was things that I'd had line around. Pro tip. When you start planning for college, shop your house first. That's a great tip. Yeah, you don't have to buy everything brand new, especially for a dorm room.

They're only going to be there for a year. I did think about this for things that could easily translate into the next space that they're going to be living in. But in terms of the dorm room itself, so this was actually a speaker I've had for, I think I've had this for almost like eight years. Okay. It was an older one, but it's a marshal,

and it's really cool because it looks like an amp. And my son's roommate is a big guitar player, so it kind of fits the vibe. Yeah, and it also has Alexa built-in, but again, we didn't get that. We haven't got that side of the smart home set up yet. I'm not sure if he even needs it. That was the other reason I was waiting on the Wi-Fi.

I was like, let's see if you feel like you need it. So we go back up in like three weeks. And I was like, let's see how your first few weeks go and if you enjoy it or not. And so far, it's all been pretty positive. I haven't had a lot of chance to find out because, you know, college kids don't call their moms very often. That's, yeah, I would know. But I did get some texts this morning because I was like, do you mind if I talk about all of your gear on the podcast? And he said, he said, all the Govi stuff has worked great and has been really easy to use.

So that was good. Okay. And then I said, how about the doorbell? And he says, no one's using it. Okay. Yeah, that's good info. Good info. The stuff you don't need is just as important as the stuff you do need.

Exactly. That's the you don't want to take too much. And then I said, is your room the coolest one you've seen? And he didn't reply. Wow. Yeah. Because I was very proud of his room. I thought we did a good job.

Yeah. Well, for parents that are sending their kids to college in the next few weeks, because we're entering college season, just to wrap up here and give people, like, a takeaway. What are the top three to five things that you think are actually making a difference in his dorm? So I would say the lighting, you know, obviously we kicked off with that. And that's what they were most excited about. And again, to the point of, like, is the roommate going to like it, that's the type of thing your roommate's going to appreciate, I think, unless you're just going to be flashing your lights all day. But I don't think that's been happening.

So I do think that the lighting is really key. The thing I wasn't expecting to really want or need, but I'm really glad we did bring was the air purifier. Great call. Could have used that. Yeah, although they're already sick and they've only been there a week. But I don't think that was the air purifier's fault. I think that was probably going to happen anyway. The thousands of other kids, yes.

That is probably what happened. And then, yeah, a good Bluetooth speaker because, you know, there are lots of inexpensive ones that have tinny sound, but the Marshall, even though it's pretty old, and there is a new version of it you can buy these days. But something like that they're going to have for a really long time. It's going to work, and you've got really good sound. So light and sound are two, you know, two things that's going to make a room feel more like home.

And I think that as long as you don't annoy the neighbours too much with loud noise, I think those two are really good option. And then the surprise winner for me was the suction cup by the wall for the lofted bed. It's hard to, you know, you don't want too much stuff up there. And you don't want cables that might like strangle them in their sleep. And so that was like, I think it was like 20 bucks on Amazon. I forget the name of the brand off the top of my head. There's so many of them though.

Sometimes the TikTok hacks are the ones that are actually useful. There you go. Wigoo vacuum magnetic phone holder for your car that works so well. I was very proud of myself on that one. So yeah. And then I did a lot of tech for the desk set up too. But that was, you know, I think the most important. important thing there, as I mentioned, is extension cables. Bring lots and bring different sizes and

shapes with different plug sizes and figure out which one works, because those, you know, you need to get creative with using the outlets and the space that you have. So some kind of cable management when you're trying to make the space feel more like home is definitely worth considering. Those would be my top tips. And you don't need the Wi-Fi, but if you have the Wi-Fi, you can get a little broader and you can add voice control and out of home out of room control so that would be the next level well i think with enough rgb your son is going to be the most popular kid in college so jennifer fattison towey thank you for joining us uh i'm excited to hear what you end up adding and uh changing when you go back in three weeks what he has to say we're going to have to have you

back on the show and maybe we can get your son on the show at some point that might actually be pretty helpful. It would be fun. We'll see if you can nail him down for 10 minutes on a video call. It's not easy. That's true. I remember those days. All right.

I appreciate it. Thank you for coming. You're welcome. Thank you. That's it for the Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1 or email Vergecast at theverge.com. And to support everything we do here and to get ad-free podcast, subscribe to the Verge.

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