The Vergecast - How to save a smart home company

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

This week on The Vergecast, we enter the Jen-era of Hot Girl Vergecast Summer, with a deep dive into the business of the smart home. The Verge’s smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (aka Jen), chats with Ken Fairbanks, a longtime customer of Insteon who ended up buying the smart lighting company when it went into bankruptcy. Ken shares the story of how one of the original smart lighting protocols, founded in the post-X10 era when home automation moved from wired to wireless, floundered, and how he and a band of users brought it back from the dead. He dishes what he’s learned about how to keep the lights on — from customer loyalty and the value of subscriptions, to what tariffs are doing to the industry and how some hardware companies are just pyramid schemes. Then, in a special supersized (and we mean SUPER) Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]), Jen is joined by smart home expert Richard Gunther, co-host of The Smart Home Show, to tackle a bunch of your burning smart lighting questions. They answer everything from how to move your smart home to which Thread border router you should buy for your Matter setup. Plus, they run down their own smart lighting set-ups. Further reading: Insteon’s troubles are a smart home tale as old as time Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act Someone turned Insteon’s lights back on Insteon customers turned Insteon’s lights back on Thread count: Ikea is stitching together a smarter home Smart switches or smart bulbs? How to choose the right smart lighting for your home Controller for HomeKit Philips Hue Play sync box and gradient lightstrip review: wholly unnecessary, totally delightful Taming Wi-Fi in the Smart Home: Leviton’s new smart light switches don’t require a neutral wire Every smart home device that works with Matter Aqara’s new seven-inch home control tablet can replace a light switch These smart lights could solve the kitchen cabinet problem Hue launches a pricey new sunrise lamp Smart string light showdown: Nanoleaf versus Lifx The best floodlight camera to buy right now How to move a smart home Moving a smart home - The Smart Home Show Living with the ghost of a smart home’s past Smart ceiling light showdown: Aqara T1M versus Nanoleaf Skylight Binding should be the next big thing for smart home devices Aqara adds support for 50 new Matter device types Flic is ready to control all your Matter devices Thread is Matter’s secret sauce for a better smart home Google Nest Thread border routers Google TV Streamer review: smarter than your average set-top box Google Nest Hub (2nd-gen) review: sleep on it Why Thread is Matter’s biggest problem right now The four changes in Thread 1.4 that could fix the protocol Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of finally figuring out how to get all of my smartlights working in one single app. I'm your friend Jen Toey and welcome to the Gen era of the Vergecast. I will be here for the next two weeks while David gets to play with his gorgeous baby. Today on the show, we are going to find out how you go about saving a smart home company. I'm chatting with Ken Fairbanks, CEO of Instion Technologies, about the unlikely comeback of one of the original smart lighting companies. Then the guy I go to when I have questions about smart lighting, Richard Gunther, is going to join me for a super-sized Vergecast hotline all about smart lighting where we tackle your burning and frankly super complicated questions about how to make

smart lighting work for you. And all that is coming up right after the break. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like, Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it. On your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all.

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Welcome back. One of the biggest fears for every smart home user is that the products that they rely on to make their homes work or one day stop working. In 2022, I covered this exact story how smart lighting company Instion went dark. Overnight, someone flipped the switch and hundreds of thousands of customers were, figuratively at least, left in the dark. Instion was not a fly-by-night startup either. It was founded in 2005 as one of the first smart lighting companies in the the post-X-10 era, when smart home went from wires to wireless. So what do you do when the product your home relies on stops working the way it's supposed to? My guest today, Ken Fairbanks, is an early Instion user, and he had a really unusual solution to that problem. He bought the company. Now, three years later, Instion is back with a new website, new products,

and Ken installed as CEO. Welcome, Ken. Thank you so much for being here with us on the Vergecast today. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you for the opportunity. So, as I was just mentioning, you are one of the smart home users that actually decided to buy the smart home company. But you weren't exactly a typical Instion customer were you? You actually helped start this company early on and have a lot of experience in the smart home. So can you tell us a little bit about your business? background with Instion? Sure. So I was with Hewla Packard for 20-some years. I left Hewla Packard in early 2000s and started doing some business consulting here in Southern California. And one of the

companies I got introduced to was Smart Home. Okay. And Smart Home is the company that owned Instion. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Absolutely right. That's a great name. Yes, it was. How did they get Smart Home as their name? Well, they were one of the early Internet retail. And so URLs and names, you know, weren't as popular as they are now. So they got smart home before anybody else did, actually. So by luck and being early to the marketplace, I guess, is the answer to that. Wow. Great. Okay. So you were working for, you got to know smart home. Yes. I was consulting with them, helping them start to look at how they would roll out the Instion technology and also the line of products, the lighting control products that they were going to make. And then after,

six months, they asked me to join the company, and I did as a general manager of the technologies and products part of the company. So that's how I got involved with them. So before we go into all of the trials and tribulations and how Instion is hopefully on the verge of a new dawn, tell me just a little bit about Instion for people who are listening who have never heard of this Smart Home lighting system and what Instion does. So when Smart Home was starting out, they were selling a product from a company called X10. Okay, so that's the original smart home protocol, right? And that was like over the wires.

Right. And that was a technology owned by somebody else. Okay. And they were just selling the products because at that point they were just an internet retailer. One of the first ever internet retailers, is that right? Like one of the first dot-coms. Yeah. They were hard-coding the website.

There was no Shopify or any of those things. They're actually hard-coding the website to get it up and running. So, yeah, very, very early on. I think it was one of the first ones that got involved in taking advantage of the Internet. And the business was perfect for that because they were selling home automation and lots of little pieces and so really hard in a brick and mortar kind of thing to be able to put enough product out and all the different brick and mortars to be able to satisfy. So this Internet really fit this business segment extremely well. That's why they succeeded and did so well as well.

But then from this internet company, they form a smart home protocol and a smart home line. How did that jump happen? Some of those just to be lucky. So they became the largest reseller of this X10 technology. And the founder was lucky to find a very bright engineer named a Dan Craig. We call him the father of Instion. He still works with me as well. So he's the one that developed the protocol.

So he understood how the X-10 technology worked and understood the issues with the X-10. There were a number of issues with the technology itself. And he then really developed the Instion Protocol. And I kind of related to if you can, because Instion does at its heart run on the power line just like X-10 did. The power line of your home. So like all the wiring in your home. Right. In essence, how that works.

It's kind of curious to me. But you have the power in your house is 110 volts, and it goes from positive and negative, and it does that 120 times a second. So at those split seconds, there's no electricity in your house. It's just bare copper wire. So at that precise second, use that to transmit. And that's why you get the most reliable signal because it's hardwired. All the devices are hardwired.

And this was X10. That's how X10 worked. That's X10 worked as well. Okay. And then Instion uses the same technology. Well, the same concept, but different technology and how the signal is propagated and put on the line. I kind of related to, in the old days, you had those dial-up modems, right? You know, right, and very slow.

And then DSL came along. It uses the same copper wires, but DSL and its speed and its reliability had nothing to do compared to the old motives. And that's kind of the same thing here. The INCTION technology took the reliability of this up to professional class from where it was, with X-TAM, which is really a hobbyist kind of technology. And so that's how they developed that. And then that's about when I joined is we're just getting ready to start close to launching that technology and the products.

And so the technology is this hardwired system with a radio, wireless radio frequency. So this was like one of the first sort of wireless smart lighting and radio frequencies developed around the same time as like Z wave and Zigby, is that right? Absolutely correct. Okay. And how does it differ from those types of technologies, though? Well, lots of different ways. So first of all, it's a mesh network. So we're not a routed network. So those networks are dependent upon.

You send a signal out or command out. The next device, and it's trying to get to a device, next device has to repeat that. And so you actually, if you try and turn all the lights on in a house at once, you're going to get what we call popcorning. Because the message is routed. It has to go through. And if one of those switches get broken,

then you're going to have a networking problem. So with the mesh network, every device, when you broadcast, every device hears the signal at the same time. And then we'll actually repeat it in simultaneously throughout the house. That's why you get very robust. But they're all single band. So you're dependent upon the radio frequency. And a lot of homes, that's a challenge if you've got brick or steel.

You're trying to get from one end of the home to another. And so that's really the uniqueness of it because we use the copper is our main. And we use the radio is kind of a backup. And that's where we're able to simulcast. Every signal goes out over both mediums. So both over the wires and wireless. And wireless, all synchronized. So it's kind of like, I guess, for people who aren't familiar with the X10,

it's sort of like having a hardwired and a mesh Wi-Fi internet network in your home. Like the reliability of hardwired, the flexibility of wireless. Correct. Okay. And this is for your smart lighting. So your light switches, your lamps, everything is working over dual-band technology. So this makes it more reliable in theory?

Oh, yeah, extremely, extremely reliable. Because if you have a little bit of a challenge, you can't have some challenges with power line with some noise or something, the radio is going to get the signal there, and vice versa. So you really get this pairing of both signals coming to the device,

and the device is smart enough to know it's received the same signal twice. It doesn't act on it two times because they're all synchronized. So it has two opportunities to get the signal. That's what the strength. And that's really the hallmark of the technology is its reliability. And then just the overall simplicity of the network and how you set up devices. And from the get-go, it's set up.

If you want to connect two devices together, it's just as simple. Go wire in, take your existing wall switch out, put the instant wall switch in. You want to plug the lamp module. have those two connect. Just press and hold the button on the sending device and press and hold the button on the receiving. They're now connected. They now talk. And you don't even need the app or even a hub or anything. It just works. Okay. So this sounds great. And this sounds like the type of smart lighting technology, everyone would want in their home. So why did it all fall apart? Well, you know, you could consider smart home a startup company to go back to the when it first began. And it's a real challenge for a lot of companies. is you grow and you develop. The leadership team often needs to change

because the skill sets to really launch a new company are different than ones maybe to grow the company. I think that's a little bit what they fell into. The founder did a wonderful job developing the company and growing it, but I think in the end, that became kind of an Achilles heel for them and their ability to be able to thoughtfully grow the company. They overextended themselves.

Then in 2017, I believe it was bought by another, user? No, essentially taken over by the shareholders. So Rob Lolanus was a shareholder. So a couple of the shareholders took over the company. Okay. And this was in 2017. Right. Okay. And that's where they kind of scaled the company back from being a whole home automation, saw on all the variety of products, and really started to scale the company to focusing on the Instion products only. So over a course of a year or so, they kind of phased out the other products just to focus on the Instion. So Rob takes over and we've got, what, five years until 2022, where one day, all of a sudden, without warning, someone flip the switch. Yes.

Just to overextend that metaphor. Yeah, no, but that's exactly what he did. Exactly what happened. That's exactly what he did. Okay, so tell me what caused the demise of the company at that stage. So I think there's a number of things. This marketplace is an interesting one. some peculiarities to it. And you really need to understand the marketplace. And I think that was

part of their challenge. You're really understanding the marketplace and what's happening in the market. And he took the company in a different direction. And once again, over-extended the company. So they ran into, again, he ran them out of money. And that's really what took place. And so then he just closed the doors one day, let the employees go and then close the doors and turned off, what everyone relates to on this is there's all these hubs that, like we mentioned, you can't, you don't need one, but lots of people have one so you can get internet connectivity. You don't need a hub for Instion, but you can use a hub. Right.

And that's, if you want to use your phone to turn the lights on and off, you want to use Alexa or Google or, you know, HomeKit or any of those kinds of things, you need some bridge to the internet. And so that's what that's for. Also, you can set up some routines and timers and some things like that using it. So famously, what transpired is the users found out that something that happened when their little hubs, they have a red and green light, and all the hubs turned red one day. Oh, it's kind of like a scene out of a movie, a sci-fi movie. Just blinking red. Red blink of death.

Yeah, there was no heads up, which is just, in these days, doesn't make a lot of sense. You've seen companies have had a challenge, but they usually will get out an email or something to everybody, hey, sorry, we're going to have to close up and give them some notice. But there was really no notice. And that's what made everyone so upset. It's just one day in April, I think it was April 22nd when everything just turned off. And without warning, without understanding what, you know, so that's why everyone got very frustrated very quickly. And now you are an Instia on user.

So did your hub go red? Oh, yes. It did. And what did you do? So I called, so like Dan Craig was still with the company, or he had just been let go, obviously, because all the employees have been let go. So I called and talked to a couple of the employees I know, because a number of them worked for me when I was there too. And so I called them and said, what's going on? What's happened? And they explained that the company went bankrupt, and he just shut it off. And I was involved. I still am with an investment group here in Orange

County. And so I was just kind of curious to learn. And so I actually reached out to see if I could just learn what was going on with no intention at that point of buying the company. Okay. So you hadn't sort of formed a plan like, okay, now's my chance. I'm back in, back in the game, going to buy the company. So, okay, so the hubs are shut off. Everyone is thinking it's done. And I know when you, once you decided to relaunch the site, you said a small group of passionate users, had brought it together. So can you talk me through how this little group came together and what you did and how you decided that you were going to pull together and resurrect the Instion Smart Home? So when I talked to the trustee of, first of all, the trustee that was now, so what happens in an ABC bankruptcy,

it's kind of interesting. A new company is formed in California, it's an LLC called an ABC LLC. And basically all the assets of the company are transferred over to that new LLC. And a trustee's then put in charge, of selling the assets. Not trying to get the company back, would have just selling the assets. Right. I think you mentioned this when we chatted before, that this was something very unique to Silicon Valley, right?

Because so many startups would just disappear. Yes. And like no one would know what to do with the furniture or... Right. That's exactly right. There was no one around, unlike most brick and mortar companies, where you can go knock on a door and say, hey, you know, pay my bill.

They just evaporate. So this isn't very unique. bankruptcy. So someone just comes in and takes over and then tries to sell whatever they can find. Like literally lift up the cushions and see what's underneath. Okay. And so this is where you came in. That's exactly right. That's when I started talking to them. And I said, well, what do you look in to sell the company for? And they gave me a number. And I said, well, my group's not interested. We're not interested. And kind of that was the end of it. And then they kept calling me. saying, make an offer, make an offer.

I go, I can't make an offer. I'm not going to, that's not going to. And they go, no, make an offer. I go, no, I'm not going to insult you. And they just kept bugging me. And I think what they knew is that I knew the people at the company and I had the ability, not that I'm a bright guy, I knew the people that could help bring the company back quickly.

It would be very difficult for anybody else to resurrect the company as quickly as we were able to do it. I put this group together. It was a CTO, general. was head of manufacturing force, in our products are manufactured overseas, the marketing person, was those triad that I brought together. That was the band of us four, and we've now since added some additional people, that knew all the things to do to get the company back up and running. And so that's why we're able to do it very quickly. So they were smarter to understand I could

actually bring some value to it. So I made them, if they pushed me enough, I may have an offer that I thought they would absolutely refuse. Okay, so this is how you do it, you lobal. I was really taken aback when they said, yes, we'll accept that. And now I understand why, because they weren't going to get anything for the company, because there weren't a lot of physical assets, there weren't a lot of product or whatever. There just wasn't a lot of value to, you know, the patents and everything have value, but someone else would have to come and figure out how to do that.

How do you, you know, like I said, I had the father of Instean alongside of me, so he knows the technology. We had all the pieces together. And they're all very passionate. The one thing is all the employees there, and myself included at the time, we were very passionate about what we were doing and very disappointed to see where the company had had. And still everyone's very passionate about. We're doing this because, you know, yes, it's a job and things, but really doing it

because we feel passionate and a lot for our customer base. We have a very unique customer base. Well, and what about you, Ken? I mean, did you not have a job? Oh, I was retired. Oh, you were retired. Okay. So that is when you want to go and buy a smartphone company.

So you're on a beach in Hawaii? Oh, yes. Famously, it still amazes me that you can be on the beach on a cell phone and buying a company. It's just kind of, I'm a tech guy, but it still boggles my mind that you can have all that transact while you're sitting on a beach there. It's kind of a fun story. It was a vacation we'd previously planned with my wife. And the transaction is taking longer. They typically do with lawyers and documents and things. And I said, you know, everyone, I'm losing customers every day because their hubs are turned off. And I said, I know I've got to turn these back on. So I talked

to the team and they said, yeah, we know exactly what to do. We can have them turned on tomorrow. there's one company we have to talk to and have them flip the switch, and I had to pay them a little bit of money. And I said, you know, even though I don't own the company now, I just know I'm losing people. This is going to take another week or so. I just can't stand that. So I actually decided to just bite the bullet and turn the hubs on. And that was on a Tuesday. The lights all turned green, and the social media started lighting up.

Oh, my gosh, is yours on, mine's on. Oh, this is great. Who's doing this? Who's behind? Anyone know who this is? Oh, this is awesome. This is great. Oh, that was Tuesday.

Wednesday. Who is the evil person that's turned these on? I remember our headline was like, somebody has turned the lights back on, but who? That, you know, someone's running your smart home, but yeah. Okay, so tell us what happened. So there are, yeah, so all the conspiracy theories came up of blaming all sorts of people, trying to get into the homes. And I was under non-disclosure at that point,

so I couldn't come and say anything. Oh. So you're just sitting there going, ah! Everyone's freaking out, and I can't say anything. So luckily, on Thursday, we're finally able to sign the agreement, and then we could put out the emails saying

who we were and why we'd done it, and we're happy to have it back and look forward to growing the company. I've got to tell you one side note, just about it. And it goes back to this fantastic customer base I have. So on Friday, I got a call from one of my now customers. I didn't know who it was or anything.

Howie got my cell phone, I don't know. And he goes, hey, what's the address for the company? And I'm like, I don't have it. So I gave him my home address, which made my wife real happy. She goes, you know how many people are upset with the previous owner? I don't want our address. I go, I didn't know what to do. So I gave it to him.

So we get home a couple days later, I think it was Monday or Tuesday. And here's a letter from this gentleman and his wife, handwritten letter. Thank you so much for bringing this back. I really appreciate it. And I hope this will help. Maybe you can celebrate it or something. It was a check for $2,000. Oh, wow.

And I said, is there something? I wrote them back. I have a little bit of product. Can I give you something or whatever? Nope, don't want anything. Just thank you so much. And that's the specialness of the user base. And that's what keeps us all going because we have such great install base.

We call it our family or our community and really believe in that. Yeah. So how long was it between lights turning off to lights turning back on? April 22nd to June 8th. Okay. So it was quite a long time. Yeah. And now they were able to use their devices, right?

It wasn't like we're in darkness. It's just they'd lost some function and potentially felt like they were no longer going to be able to buy new product. or have see any advancements or improvements come to the product. Okay. So you've bought a smart home company. This took, it sounds like about six weeks to sort of turn the lights back on. So what's the next step? What did you have to do?

Because obviously, there's got to have been a lot of concern from that in-store base saying, what's happening. And, you know, how do you win back customer trust? How do you rebuild a brand after this type of kind of, you know, how do you raise the phoenix from the flames here? Well, the first part is the easiest one. Just be honest and truthful and up front. And, you know, we scheduled Zoom meetings, which all our customer base was invited to attend,

and we'd get several hundred each one of the times I'd do that, and just be candid, take questions, live questions for them, and just be honest in what we're doing, and tell them what our challenges are and how we're going to grow the company. So, I mean, the first thing to do was to get our products remanufactured. So getting the manufacturing lines back up again, contacting the previous or the contract manufacturers were making them and start to give them orders and get the products underbuilt.

But that took, you know, three or four months. Just once you get the orders, it takes three or four months with shipping and everything to get that up. So that was a key part of insured everybody. We've got the products. We've got the port. ones already on order. And then we also find, is we built out the whole family of products, because now we have about 100 skews. And as we've been adding them in, that's one of the

things where I engage the community and say, okay, I've got these products. We've got this going, what's the next one you want me to go spend time? Because I want to be thoughtful in growing the company. I don't want to financially overextend it again, which has been done before. Yeah. And I've been very open with everybody. That's what we're doing. And that's why we're easing all the products. And now, you know, three years later, just about all the products are back in manufacturing, and we have them back in stock. The other part then was related to the hubs. And really a belief is we sat down and talked about it. And this is, I think we're going to see this across the marketplace. But I really felt it was important that the app and the hub be a self-sustaining business.

And I realize that a lot of the competition, a lot of people out there today, they subsidize the app through hardware sales. And I just don't think that's a sustainable business. As long as you keep growing your hardware and stuff, you can get away with that for a while. And I think we're going to find a lot of the manufacturers now. I think even Amazon's talking about it with Alexa and stuff, starting to have levels of price for it.

So make it very affordable. But it also then enables us to independently invest in the app because they had not been invested in the app. So, yeah, the app was free. it was being subsidized by hardware, but they weren't spending any money to develop the app. So the app had been stagnant for a couple of years. And so we've been taking that revenue and have been investing in improving the app, adding new features to the app, and building that back out.

And for the most part, people have been accepting of that and understanding why we're doing that. And the assurance of them is it's not going to just shut down again one day. The lights aren't going to turn red. So when you say of that, so you instituted a subscription, is that right? subscription, yeah. Okay, and for what do you need the subscription for? Like, can you use the devices without the subscription? Absolutely.

As I mentioned, you don't need a hub. You don't need any kind of computer module. That is unique to Instion. I think almost every other needs some kind of controller to build, even set up devices. We can go into some of the particulars, but you can do a lot of advanced features without any kind of hub. Okay, but now if you want the hub and you want the app for that kind of, control with your phone, control with voice, presumably, like with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant,

you need the app and the hub? Yes. And how much does that cost now? The app is $39 a year, and the hub is $99 with one year of free subscription. So I clude one year with the subscription with the purchase of a new hub. And then it's $39 a year. If you buy two years, you get it for a little bit less. And what does that get you?

So it gets you a number of things. One of the things is we backup your configuration. So if you ever have a problem, you can get a new hub and we can repopulate the hub. So you have a backup of your configuration. You can see your configuration. You can download it. It allows you also, you can do setup. Instead of press press, you can do the setup from the app.

You just say connect these two devices together. You can do that. You can set up timed events. And then, as we mentioned, you get voice, you get phone connections so you can control. You also can get alerts now. So you can get an alert that the water, you know, the water sensor has gone off and you can get an alert sent to your phone. So the door's been open. So you get all, you get the alerts.

So all those kind of features coming. And we're looking at additional features in the future coming. So we're continuing to add things to the app as well. Now, but these were features that previously the users had without having to pay. So how did that go down with the use of base? Because that's generally not well received. Well, again, I think that we have a special install base. And when I explained to them, and I was very honest with them, that this needs to be a self-sustaining business. You just can't subsidize it long term. And particularly, we had no hardware to even sell if we wanted to do that. At that point, right? Because you were still ramping up the supply chain. Right. Exactly, exactly right. So I think they appreciated the honesty for it. And they also now appreciated the investment because now they're seeing that the app is actually getting better. So they're not just putting, they're seeing the app improve. Yeah. I don't have to raise the hardware prices just to subsidize that. So I can keep the hardware prices, which is the vast majority of your cost is going to be through hardware versus, you know, the app, you know, it's one one time of year fee. It's, you know, not that great. I mean,

$39 isn't going to break anybody, so to speak. But you do get the pushback. I can get this from free before. And I said, yeah, but understand, that's also partially why the company had to shut down, right, because they didn't have the revenue coming in to support it. And I don't want that to happen again. I don't want there to be an issue. I want to be able to run the, you know, continue the hub business as a self-sustaining business. Now, that's interesting. We've seen this happen more and more with hardware smart home companies that they're adding subscriptions. Do you really feel like, that is the only sort of long-term sustainable business model for the smart home as like recurring

subscriptions? And if so, why is that? Why can it not just depend on hardware? Well, it's an interesting thing. So the lighting control, we have a little bit of unique position, right? Because as I mentioned, you're going to continue to add products to the home and grow the home. So you get continued for that user, it's going to continue to get hardware sales. And so you can justify, potentially justify subsidizing the app. But if you go and look at the apps, most of the other home automation devices in the home are single unit. Maybe you have two thermostats.

Probably not. You probably have one thermostat. I just put in a water sensor, a leak sensor at the main. I'm going to buy one of those for the house. There's only one pipe I can connect that to. So if you look at that, they're going to get a one-time hardware sale for me. And then supposedly now they're going to give me this free app for the rest of

to my life. And you can see it's not sustainable. It becomes a little bit of a pyramid scheme of sorts. You've got to keep getting the next user that's going to put in that water sensor to pay for my free service that I'm getting. The smart home is a pyramid scheme. I like it. And I think it also, this helps to, it puts, it's incumbent upon the manufacturers. And for us, we've got to add real value with the hub too in the app. We've got to continue to add value to it. And if it doesn't deliver value, then, okay, I understand. Then you shouldn't be using it.

And there are other solutions. There are other companies that provide apps to control art. So you don't have to use us either, and some of them are free. Did you find that there was much of a drop-off from the user base once you added the subscription model, or were most people kind of happy to pitch in, so to speak? seen as you had bought the company for them. A large portion of them continued with us. The renewal rates, because now this is our third year renewals, the renewal rates very high,

so I'm really pleased with that. So the most common thing if the renewal doesn't happen, it's I moved houses. I've told a new homeowner how to go get it, and I'll be buying this with my new house that I've bought. That's our biggest, because we do, if you don't renew, we ask you why, and that's our biggest one. one is I moved homes. So because you run a smart home company and you manufacture overseas, I do have to ask, how has the last six months or so being in terms of getting products? It's all I can do to keep smiling. It's been horrific. It's just, I feel bad as I talk to others, particularly small businesses like mine. I mean, we're not that small, but we're still small

compared to some of the big companies out there. It's tough. Because you can't plan. I don't know from one day to the other what's going to happen. So it's sound a little bit of a kink in my plans for this year because I wanted to be more aggressively marketing and things. And right now I'm just focused on getting product back in and solving some of those kind of problems. But we do have plans for a big relaunch of the brand and companies still this year. I know Instion was an original launch partner with Apple HomeKit, but as I understand it, doesn't work with Apple anymore. Correct.

So obviously right now in the smart home, matter and thread, which is another protocol that can be used for lighting, is kind of the hot new thing. Is matter something that Instion is looking at? Because that would help with interoperability. No, absolutely. Matter is an interesting, you know, capability. And we'll be adding matter capability. It'll be an interface into matter. One of the challenges is for Matter products,

Because the hope is to go across multiple manufacturers, but that means you have to bring the feature set down to lowest common denominator. So I think what we're going to see for the most part, you're going to see the Lutrons, the Insteons, whatever, they're going to continue to exist because there's just too many things you can do that you're not going to be able to do with matter. But you'll have an interface into matter so that you can then interconnect. And where matter becomes is those people that are going to develop the apps

to really be able to control the home. That's the other part of matter. Someone's got to develop the app. And if you're not selling the hardware, then back to my thing, the matter apps are going to have to be subscription-based because otherwise they don't have any revenue. And Apple and HomeKit, I think that becomes important. So I plan, we'll get back to connection with HomeKit as there. Apple's now trying to get back into this marketplace, and we'll be there to support that.

So we have plans. That's on the roadmap, in fact, under work right now to be able to bring that, you know, that capability back in. So you were retired three years ago when you bought a smart home company. So what do you see as the future for this smart home company and your role in it? I'm sure you'd like to get back to the beach in Hawaii at some point. My wife certainly would. Yeah, so I'd like to see, you know, I'd like to see the, you know, next couple years that the company double or triple in size, which I think is very doable and makes it a nice size business.

you know, I've got a good team of people that they're taking more and more of a role in running the company, which is great. And I see that evolving. And then someone taking, you know, my day-to-day kind of responsibilities. And, you know, I'll kind of just, you know, go to maybe an advisory, you know, kind of level with the company and help it continue to grow from that standpoint. Do you think it's possible that it would be a company that might get purchased? Like, would you look to sell it or do you feel like it needs to stay at it? in its own. No, I think that would be certainly open to do it to the right people. That really, my commitment is to the customers. And if I felt someone had a passion,

and like I said, the team, yes, they do it for a salary, but that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it because they really care about the customers. I know it sounds corny and it's hard to believe, but it really is true. Everyone really wants to do and really cares about the customers. So if I could find someone that same passion and they're willing to continue to thoughtfully grow the company, then I'd be happy to step back some and let a younger person, so to speak, you know, take on the role I have. But that's the critical part to it. So the next couple of years, you know, hopefully I'm going to be able to do that. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I guess, you know, the reason I ask that question is because Instion users

have obviously been through a lot. So what is their kind of reassurance here that this isn't going to happen again? Why should they stay committed to the company? Why should new people invest in, product from Instion, what's kind of assurances can Instion offer that this isn't going to happen again? Is there some kind of open source option for the technology so that they would have options if this happened again? Or are you just 100% sure this is not going to happen again? I'm 100% sure. I'm really committed to it. They said yes. I mean, I think what the previous company did, they could have, is an example, they could have started a subscription and kept all the hubs work. And if that was it was a cash flow issue, why you didn't do that, I don't understand.

They could have kept things going. You certainly could license the technology, the product's out to somebody else from that standpoint. And barring some other unforeseen circumstance, I mean, you know, tariffs going to 400 percent and no one wants to pay for the product. I see a bright future for the company. And again, it's transparency. I mean, that's my commitment. And in fact, to have it over here in the desk here are values. And the first value here is transparency to the customer base and telling them what's going on and not hiding from them, let them know and assuring them. We're profitable. We're making a profit. Haven't had to put money into the company. We're not extended in any financial shape. And so that's the commitment. But I think that's for

all of them. And I'm trying to be accessible too. I mean, I take phone calls. I call customers back, which I think is important because that's how you can. get to hear what's really going on. It's always, it's always amazing to you when I call a customer. And I just say, this is Ken from Inscyon. I saw your email and whatever. I just wanted to learn a little bit more about what it. And it's, it's funny to see their reaction when they go, wait a minute, you're the Ken that sends out the Ken emails. You're the, that's you. I go, yeah. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry to take your time. I go, no, no, that's, this is, I learned this at Hewlett Pack. You got to talk to your customers. The CEO of HP would do the same thing.

And that's what he taught me. You got to talk to the customer. You'll get hidden from the truth of what's going on. So I said, you guys are doing me a service by telling me what's on your mind and what's concerning you. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's been a journey for you, Ken. And I'm really glad that you could come on and talk us through it. It really does kind of shed a light on the whole industry in a way and help, I think,

hopefully help people understand what's happening in this industry and how hopefully things are looking up, because smart lighting really does make a big difference. I know when my family, when we go to a hotel or something, and my husband's like Alexa, turn the lights off. I'm like, it's not going to work here, hon. It's something, it is a luxury, but it is one of those luxuries that becomes a necessity and really does add a lot of value. So I'm glad to see that you were able to bring Instion back.

And what's next for the company? I understand you've recently relaunched the website for Instion, rebranded. So just tell us a little bit about what's changed and what the future is here for the technology and the product. Well, I think with the rebranding of the company, you'll see a new logo from us, which really reflects the values of the company and how we're moving forward. So I encourage everyone to go check it out. The website is a complete redo.

It's night and day from where our current. And I think the focus is in the redo is to make it easier for customers to find the products and easier for them to understand how the products work and be more value to the customer than the previous website. And I will, everyone that's listening, if you, I'm open to any ideas, if you're an Instaun customer or you're not, I'm open if there's some things we can be doing better, you think things we ought to focus on. Please reach out to me and let me know. We'll put his home address in the show notes. There you go.

Excellent. Well, I appreciate your time again, Ken, and we need to take another break. And when we come back, we're going to do a supersized Vergecast hotline where I will be joined by a special guest. and we'll be answering a lot of your questions on smart lighting. So I hope you like this topic because there is more of it. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder,

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Richard Gunther is going to join me to help answer a whole bunch of questions on this topic, which is a topic I get asked about all the time. And it's kind of a hard one to write about unless I was going to write like a 5,000-word essay because everyone's home setups are so unique. So I thought one of the best ways to help all of you out was to get the guy I go to when I have, have questions about smart lighting on to help me answer all of your questions. So a quick bit of background on Richard. He's a blogger and podcaster and the host of three shows, the smart home show, home on and entertainment 2.0. And he's obsessed with smart lighting. Plus, his day job is as a

product experience consultant. So it's like literally his job to make things easier to use. So welcome, Richard, and thank you for joining me. I'm very glad to be here. I always love talking about lighting, perhaps a little bit too much. Great. Okay, so I'm going to, we have quite a lot of questions here. I'm not sure how many will get through, but we're going to kick it off with one that seems deceptively easy, which is quite a common theme here. It's like, oh, but surely that's simple. Anyway, okay, So the first one is from Cole Kennedy, and his question is, I've always wanted to have my lights gently, gradually brighten in the morning. Any idea if this is possible via HomeKit, or do I have to create it in the Hue app? Basically, I really want an exploration on how others automate their lights. Well, Cole, you've come to the right place.

It's funny, for the most part, most of the big ecosystems don't just support this natively. So if you're thinking about your home app on either Google or Apple, this isn't something they just have available that you can do. You usually need the product's own app to do this. Hugh does have a mechanism for doing this and a routine or I think it was a lab for a while where they would allow you to set the length of time, that you wanted the light to come on, the color, stuff like that. And, you know, it could be up to, say, 30 minutes time. I wake up a little bit faster than that. I used to do this in my home 10 years ago or more with basic Instion products.

This is something that Instion had built into their solution right from the beginning that you could have it take up to eight minutes for a light to come on to full, which is enough to, it gets you past that jolt of light in the morning if you have the lights automate automatically. But I think generally you're going to find that for the most part you need to rely on a manufacturer's own app to do this. Recently, you posted how the newer hub from IKEA, and I always get this wrong, I think it's I'm going to do you. I'm going to say, because I'm not going to try.

It's going to work as basically a matter controller. And IKEA is one of the systems that has this capability. So there's a possibility, we don't know this yet, but there's a possibility that the IKEA hub could do this for other lights in your home, which would be really cool. That would, because that is the main frustration with this right now is that, yes, the answer to his question is, you do have to use the Hugh app to do this. Apple Home doesn't support it yet, which is frustrating and surprising. You would expect this to be something you could do. Apple Home does have adaptive lighting, which is that changing the light throughout the day. Right.

But it's not the same thing as gradually turning on in the morning. It's just changing the tone of the light. Exactly. It doesn't adjust the brightness. It just changed the tone. It seems like a small thing. And one day, maybe Apple Home will support this. But, yeah, it's frustrating that you have to stick with one brand.

And this is something I've come across because I love using this feature for my kids to get them sort of going in the morning, like slowly turn the lights on. And so I just have, I've defaulted to having hue bulbs in their rooms because they're the ones that do this best. There are other bulbs that do it. But again, you're always going to have to be with one ecosystem, which with lighting, as we will discuss, gets complicated. You don't really want to be locked in to one brand. It does. And yeah, this is exciting with the new matter controller feature coming to more hubs and potentially being able to use the features that are more specific to what you want to do in the smart home. I mean, IKEA is very much focused around lighting, and so this is something

they offer. So I'll be really interested to see if that's going to be possible, because in theory, you'll be able to connect any matter-compatible light bulb to the IKEA hub and then set whatever routines and options it offers on those bulbs. So yeah, stay tuned. This may get easier. Hopefully. Okay, so because Cole, you did ask how others automate their lights, we're going to do a quick rundown of how Richard and I automate our lights in our homes. So Richard, why don't you go ahead and give us a kind of rundown on what you have set up and why? Why is always the kind of interesting part, I think. It is. It is. So I'm primarily focused around HomeKit. When HomeKit became more robust, I moved away from. from Amazon as my ecosystem and primarily worked with HomeKit. Now, before I used to have all different apps controlling a bunch of different stuff, and I've always been an advocate for trying to get things on the same platform, if you can.

And now, HomeKit's pretty good for that, but there are still a few holdouts. Companies like Ring and some others still don't offer devices that work necessarily directly with HomeKit. So I also use Homebridge, which is one of those things where, you know, bake your own Raspberry Pi server or throw it on a NAS that you have in your basement or something like that if you're that much of a geek and it lets you connect some things to HomeKit that otherwise wouldn't be accessible. So I use that and all of my scenes and all of my automations are through HomeKit. You run everything on HomeKit, which is using the home app on your iPhone. Using the Apple Home ecosystem, primarily with the Home app, that's what I use as my day-to-day. But my secret sauce to setting this all up is a lesser-known app called Controller for HomeKit. This is an independent developers app that ties into your Apple Home ecosystem and lets you see and control far more about your Apple Home devices than Apple's own home.

app does. Oh, right. Yeah. So Apple's about making stuff simple, so they hide a lot of stuff. This app, controller for HomeKit, helps you see all those other facets or attributes of your devices, which could be things like ramp rate. For example, the levitin switches allow you to adjust how long, how many seconds it takes for a light to come on when you flip that switch. or when you start a scene with it.

And you could set that in the case of Levitin switches up to 25 seconds. It's not an enormous amount of time. But that flexibility is really nice and has its uses for different scenes. The lighting control in my house is largely done through switches. And for that, I have a combination of levitin switches, keypads, dimmers. They have a really good motion dimmer, one of the few in the market where you can get a smart dimmer with a motion sensor built into it and either use them together or independently. I love that. Lutron is an old stalwart in the community, and I heavily rely on their stuff.

I've also tested and reviewed a bunch of their things. I have some In Avelli matter-based switches. In Aveli is a third party that creates switches for systems that are compatible with matter or compatible with Zigby or ZWave. And I also have some Instion switches through my home. I've had Instion stuff for years and years. And while it doesn't tie into everything else that I use right now, it's really good for point solutions. So, for example, I have closets with indoor closet door. sensors, that as soon as I open the closet door, the light inside the closet goes on.

And things like that are really helpful for being able to remember not to leave a light on if you have a light in your closet or something like that. Now, for lighting bulbs, color lighting in particular, I think it was you. I think I can blame you, Jen, for getting me hooked on the Cube Play Sync system, which is the mechanism for synchronizing the lights in a room with either what you're seeing on your TV or on your computer or music that's playing. It allows you to synchronize video with ambient color throughout a room. So in my family room, I have a bunch of those hooked up to my TV. And I also have a bunch of outdoor accent lighting from Hugh, because

they are one of the few vendors that came out early with outdoor lighting. So how do you make everything work? Like, are you doing like motion sensors, routines, schedules? You know, that's kind of, that's always the tricky part. It is. It is. The motion sensors seem like the solution, but they are not always. Yep.

No, that's exactly right. So, you know, I mentioned motion sensors. They work in certain cases. I use motion sensors in places like my pantry and my laundry room, places that I'm going to be walking in and out of where my hands might be full. And I don't want to have to think about whether the light is on or not. It's just going to happen automatically. Same with some closets.

My primary bedroom closet, for example, has a motion sensor in it. I think that works in some cases, not in others. There's sometimes where it's hard to tune a motion sensor or have a motion sensor in the right place to be able to turn lights on. So I use that mostly for utility spaces. Sometimes I even have just dumb switches with motion sensors built into them for like my utility room or we have a storage room that has a light in it as well. I don't need anything fancy for that. It doesn't matter if I can monitor whether that light is on or not. So I can just use a plain old motion light for stuff like that.

Elsewhere in the house, though, I do need things like routines for lighting to come on at night or maybe off in the morning or off when we go to bed. I have a go-to-bed routine where I constantly hear from Siri telling me that she wasn't able to turn something that I had asked off. There's always something. So you just say when you go, hey, S, it's time to go to bed. Good night or I'm going to bed. It's very flexible in what you can say, exactly. Yeah. And then that triggers a good night scene for me.

And that good night scene, I'm constantly updating because every time I add a new device, I usually want to make sure that that's also part of what I'm turning off at night. Right. I also do have a couple of scenes and automations where we just have lights come on whether we're home or not just to make it look like we're home for security purposes. Oh, security things. Yeah, that's great. And do you automate all of this through Apple? All of it through Apple. Yep. You also use buttons at all so that you don't have to use voice control? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm a big, big proponent of physical controls. There isn't any.

light in my house that can't somehow be controlled with a button somewhere or a switch somewhere. I'm a big fan of keypads. We're starting to see companies come out with keypads that can be programmed to trigger a scene. That's a great use. I have a keypad, for example, in my butler's pantry, one for coffee time, one for drinking time, one for cleanup time. And so those are very helpful to just get all the right lights on for the right use of the space. Okay, well, before we jump into my setup, with anything else, you wanted to call out that we hadn't mentioned about your setup? Well, it sounds like you've got it pretty diled in there.

You feel like it's working the way you want? Is it just tweaks for like when you add things, or do you have any major issues that you're still trying to fix? I have occasional issues. Every once in a while, my huge devices don't want to fully behave on HomeKit. And that's a pretty well-known problem. You occasionally have to kind of disconnect them and reconnect them to HomeKit

to make them work properly. So I have some problems with those. Every once in a while, I'll just have a scene randomly stop working and I have to troubleshoot what's going on. Oftentimes, it's Wi-Fi-related. And I did a recent episode of the Smart Home Show about using smart products on Wi-Fi and some of the ways you can avoid problems there. I should probably take some on my own advice. And that was a great episode. I listened to it and we'll include it in the show notes because

it's a real kind of, it starts with like Wi-Fi 101, but then goes to like how to set up Wi-Fi for your smart home properly. So definitely listen to that. Excellent. Okay, great. Well, I'm going to just quickly run through mine because mine is pretty unusual. And I'm mainly because, well, I have two issues that make it different. One is I'm always testing new stuff, so that throws everything out the window half the time in terms of automations and making things work smoothly. But the other big issue I have is I do not have neutral wires in most of my home, because my home was built in the early 60s. I do have two rooms that were recently remodeled, which do have neutral wires. But this is a big issue in the smart home, especially if you want to use smart switches, because they require

a neutral wire. And there's all sorts of technical electrical details we could go into. But I'll gloss over it for now. But basically, there are very few smart switch lighting solutions that don't require neutral wires. There are a couple, and I have tried them. One of them is from Leviton. I use that in my daughter's bathroom, but it requires a little bridge plugged in nearby. And that works relatively well. It's just an on-off switch. And the reason I use it is because she never turns her light off. So I have it set on a schedule through the Leviton app to turn off after an hour. Or I can also, through smart home control, I can ask to turn it off because I can see it from the living room. So when I'm watching TV and the lights on up there, then I don't have to go all the way

at the stairs. So those kind of like conveniences, that's one of the big things. The main thing I'm used smart lighting for in my house is that convenience, especially from the family's perspective, because my house is quite open. So when we're sitting in the living room, the, you know, hey, S, trigger movie time. And we still say trigger because I taught my husband years ago when we first got smart home devices, we had a wink hub. And when it connected to Amazon's assistant, you had to use the word trigger to get it to work. And he's been trained so well that he still uses that.

You don't have to use that phrase, but it's just funny that it's still there for him. But yeah, you know, one, using the word movie time to one of our smart assistants turns off all of the lights, dims a couple areas so that we're not in pitch black. You know, those kind of solutions like your good night scene are what makes smart lighting so great for me. So my main control method like yours is Apple HomeKit, primarily because I love the control center on iPhone. It's just so easy. Just being able to swipe down and hit a button to take. turn off a light rather than having to use voice. Voice is great for those routines and scenes, but not for individual control so much.

We did use Amazon's assistant primarily for a long time because it worked with everything. But since Matter, I have got to the point where almost everything in my home currently can be controlled through Apple Home because of Matter. So that, for example, my living room kitchen is all open plan. I have the Lutron Kusata smart switches everywhere because of the neutral wire issue. That's the other brand that does not require a neutral wire. So even though we remodeled our kitchen recently, but I still put Lutron in because I wanted to have the same switches. This is another thing.

You don't, you know, it's nice to have the same controls in all rooms of the home. So I have Lutron Kucsatistasas smart switches because they also control decorative light fixtures. because I wanted nice lights in my living room. I didn't want, or this is actually in my kitchen, I have like gold pendant lights and, well, they're brass kind of. You know, I wanted something sort of more interior designer and not like Govi. No offense to Govi. But, you know, I wanted something that looked nice in my kitchen rather than sort of

RGB lights. And that's where you really do need to use smart switches. Even Hughes stuff, they have fixtures. which are nice, but they're still like black. There's very little kind of interior design happening with smart light fixtures, which is a shame. Very contemporary, very Scandinavian. Yes, exactly. And then the one sort of exception to the rule I have in my kitchen is I have one Akara H2 dual switch,

which uses Zigby or thread, which is interesting. You can choose between the two. Either one connects it to Apple Home. and it's a dual switch because the way my kitchen was wired, I have lights above my sink and under cabinet lightings that go into the same circuit and have to have. And there aren't very many smart switches out there that have that dual option.

True, true. Because in the old days, that would just go to those small switches that would kind of stick through what would normally be used for an electrical outlet. And you'd just have one switch on top of the other. Those Akaris switches are beautiful, spelt devices that are also incredibly powerful. One thing I really wanted from my undercabinet lighting was color lighting, and I wasn't able to do that because when I remodeled my kitchen, there were no good options for hardwired undercabinet LED color changing lighting.

There are now some. GE sync has one. And then, yeah, so the living room is mainly bulbs. I have hue bulbs. Well, actually, I just switched them out. I have a carob bulbs now in the living room. But thankfully, those now work through matter. And then I have two dumb LED bulbs connected to a luchum cassette switch.

I have nano-leaf panels on the wall. And I have a Leifax smart lamp for like ambient lighting. Again, everything there works now through Apple Home, thanks to matter. Nice. And then the rest of the house, I mentioned my kids' bedrooms earlier. That's hue lighting. and then my bedroom has dumb, bad word, I'm sorry, non-smart LED, 8 can lights that are BR 40s. I do not know what was in my builder's mind when he did this.

Wow. Because I know. Those are massive. I know. They're huge. It's like a runway in my bedroom when the lights are of full brightness. It's crazy. But I have those connected right now to a Gen 1 brilliant wall switch.

which is a touchscreen wall switch. And that's where I also do have a neutral wire in this room because it's newer. So I use this one to test different switches quite often. Motion detection is quite useful for me in this one. I like to have the lights turn on as I walk in as long as I can adjust the timing because there's nothing worse than like a cat walking past at 2am and turning your lights on. So yes, I do adjust when those can turn on. And then on my bedside table lamps I have testing.

two hue lamps right now. They have the twilight and the table lamp and they are actually awesome, the twilight especially for those kind of sleep wake up routines we were talking about earlier. They kind of take it to the next level from the bulbs. So, and then in my bathroom, I have a very complicated setup. I have four hue bulbs in my vanity, which, you know, the vanity has like four lights controlled by a TP link tapo matter on off switch. because you cannot put LED bulbs, smart LED bulbs on a dimmer switch, because they'll go nuts. So it's an on-off switch, and then I also have the fan and the two regular light fixtures in the room, or controlled by tapo. So I have four tapo smart switches in there. And those are all matter now.

So again, I can control all of that through Apple Home, and I also can control the tone of the lights, which is very important when you are using vanity lights because you want really bright light in the mornings when you're doing makeup or getting ready, but when you walk in to go to the loo at 2 a.m. You want it to be really dim. So that, unfortunately, I really want to get that set up with a motion sensor because that's obviously a nice feature when you walk in a room at night. But I have not managed to get it to work properly, mainly because something keeps going wrong and it will turn off.

And my husband said to me, if the lights turn off in the bathroom on me one more time, I'm going to rip them out of the wall. Yeah, I get that every once in a while. Got to do some work there. But yes, throughout the house, I do have a few areas I use motion sensors, but as you mentioned, those specific use cases is where I find it most helpful. So I also have a hue bulb and a hue motion sensor in my laundry room. As you mentioned, that's something you do.

And that works really well because you can use Hughes Adaptive Lighting feature where you just press a button in the app and it will automatically schedule the light to turn on at different temperature based on the time of day. So if I walk into the laundry room at 2am, not something I do regularly, it will come on at a dimmer light, whereas when I walk in at 8 a.m, it comes on nice and bright so I can see what I'm doing. Yep. What are you doing for outside lighting? Yes. So that is an area I've been testing a lot of new stuff because you mentioned Hugh was the main player in this space for a long time and they were kind of the only player. But recently, a lot of people have moved into this space. So I actually right now have the nano-leaf outdoor string lights around my patio and the LIFX string lights around

my porch and they're great. They're so fun. Again, during holidays, you can change the colors. And then, but generally we just have them on a nice sort of warm tone. So it's lovely to sit out at night under them. And then I have, I actually have some ring motion sensing activated lights along the path. But mine are battery powered. I actually got them a long time ago. They recently, I think they have solar-powered ones now. The battery power means that half the time, they're dead, and I haven't gotten around to put the 1,500 D batteries back into them.

I need to get them working again. Yep. I remember those very well. Yeah, that was like their first ones that came out, I think. And then I recently added, and I've been testing the AI dot, AI dot is the name of the brand, and they have little solar-powered pathlights, And those are colorful as well. They're Bluetooth, though, which has been a bit of a pain.

Because this is the issue, once you put things in the garden, connectivity can become a problem. And then I have floodlight cameras. So like a ring floodlight camera, I test a lot of different floodlight cameras. So that's the security lighting. And then just a week or so ago, I installed a new device from Govi, which is something I had never come across before. It's basically like a street lamp. It's a smart street lamp that you can stick in your garden. It's huge. It's like 10 foot tall.

And it has this awesome big kind of canopy. And you can have lights that go up, but you can also have lights that go down. And it's all color changing. And when I turn it on at night, my whole backyard is like lit up. Yeah. It's a lot of lumens, if I remember correctly. It's a lot of lumens, yes. But I have definitely restrained from the permanent outdoor lighting.

thing that everyone's doing on the houses. Yeah, me too. I think Govi and Nanoleaf all have those. GE. Sync, I think, also has an option there. And I just can't get into that. It just seems like a bit too much for me. So. Yeah. Well, I look at that as like I look at smart fridges, right? My house is going to be there forever. This technology is going to be outdated in five or six years, probably. So do I really want to invest the time to install something, quote, permanently? I don't know how I feel about that. Okay. So thanks for the rundown. Hopefully some of that will give you some inspiration, Cole from your question of how others automate their lights. But we're going to move on to another question about smart lighting. And this is from Ty, from Oregon. And he's actually

called in and left us a voicemail. So we're going to listen to that now. Hi, Virg Team. I've been doing the smart home thing for a while now, and Home Assistant is my hub for all the stuff. It makes life so much easier. I have the house where I want it, but realized that I might be setting myself up for some future headaches if I ever want to sell. I have a whole bunch of different system, thread where I can get it, Wi-Fi where I can't, and I'm currently running GoV-Rissed LED lights, LIFX overheads, Modern forms, fans with light attachments, shelly relay switches, as well as a bunch of casa switches that I've turned into smart scene controllers. If I ever want to leave this place, am I just absolutely hosed? Thanks for the time. I appreciate it. Yeah. This is a very common issue when it comes to the smart home, and it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue as the smart home matures and more and more people have smart homes and more and more people. people are moving from smart homes. And this is actually something that I've written about in the past,

so that we have a whole article on The Verge about how to move your smart home. And I know, Richard, you did a couple episodes of your Smart Home Show podcast dedicated to this exact question. Correct. So go listen to those for more details. We'll include some links. But for now, what would your sort of first response to this question be, other than what a cool lighting setup you have, Ty, I'm impressed. Impressive. Very impressed. You know, the how-hosed are you thing, I think,

it really depends on what you want to have happen to all of that stuff when you move. I'm assuming you'll want to take some of it with you. Other stuff that's built in, like thermostats and doorbells and things like that, you probably don't want it take with you. You'll probably leave those behind. So the biggest thing that I learned the last time that I did this, and I ended up transferring a bunch of accounts over to make this easier. And now I do this this way in my new home is I created a house email address.

That's exactly what I say to do in my article. Yeah. I think Stacey Higginbotham was the one who came up with this idea. I think it was Stacey. It was Stacey. So props to Stacey, it's such a good idea. Sorry, you keep explaining. Well, and so I, for my ring account and for my,

chamberlain account for the garage door and for my nest account. Actually, Nest account, yes, but now with Google, you can't really do that anymore. But for things that are more or less permanent, for all of those, I created the accounts using the house email address. And the reason for that was that when I moved from my last house, I just wanted to sign that stuff over to the next owner. And I didn't want to have to worry about how do we transfer these out of my account. And then they have to figure it all out to set it all up again. What a hassle would that be? So it was a lot easier if it was just on a house account. And then there is the undoing of things that you want to take with you. And that in itself can take a lot of time. Don't underestimate what effort that can be

because you may have routines and scenes and stuff like that that you'll want to probably capture because if they're useful to you, they might be useful to you in a new home and a new setup. So that requires a fair amount of planning. But seriously, if you've invested in Leifix and Govi and other bulbs that are a lot more expensive than just your average LedyD bulb, take them with you. You don't want to be leaving that kind of stuff behind. Just go to Home Depot and buy a few, you know, inexpensive, decent LEDs and swap them back in. and take those with you. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, there are some studies that say, you know, the smart features in homes can help sell it. So if you're kind of setting the home up,

showing it off with the smart features in, then obviously those are likely need to convey or be part of your sales process. So I did check in, so you mentioned Ty that you use home assistant. And I did check in with Paolos, who is the founder of... and CEO of Home Assistant about what he would recommend in terms of moving your system to someone else. Because as he points out, Home Assistant is all local. So in theory, and his answer is you can just hand over the password and username to the new owner, and they can just change it to their own and everything should just work. It should just switch over.

However, should. There's definitely a should in there. There isn't like an official transfer method, he said. But the should is if any of the products that you're using with Home Assistant are cloud dependent, which they could be, like the Govi and the Leifax could, you could be using with Wi-Fi or in the cloud, although both of them now have matter support. But if they are cloud-dependent, then you're going to have to transfer somehow that account. And that's where things get a little tricky.

And he said, you know, that would be that, you know, some sort of authentication is going to be required that you'd need to share. And this is where having set them up originally on a house email account would make life a lot easier for you. But Paolo's did say to us about this question that he said, this is something that open standards will solve because they're all local. And just to clarify that, that means that your devices are working locally in your home and not dependent on the internet. So they work just like your standard door lock would. Like you wouldn't have to worry about transferring ownership of your door lock or most of the other things that you would leave in your house when you sell it to someone. And this is something that things like Matter and home assistant brands and systems that are working locally without cloud dependencies should make easier because they're just going to become part of the infrastructure of our home. It doesn't mean you won't have an internet connection because there are benefits to that.

you don't have to have the internet connection, right? Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think that's a really optimistic solution. I think the biggest thing that concerns me about that is that I'm assuming if you've put this much time into your home assistant environment, you've probably created some automations that are specific to your household's use of the space. Yeah. So those may be jarring or undesired by a new homeowner. So one of the other things that you should make sure you do is talk with the buyer during the purchasing process.

Once you have that contract signed, find out, do they want you to keep this stuff there? Do they want to, you know, remove some of it? If they're ultimately going to remove it anyway, then why not keep the assets? and I would suggest turning off most of your automated stuff for them to then determine which of those routines make sense for their lifestyle. Yes. So I don't know if you remember, Richard, a while back I contacted you because a colleague at the verge's brother had just moved into a new house that had all Instion. But they had no idea of what was happening or how to use it. And like the lights would just turn on at random times in the day and the shades would raise. And they didn't know what to do.

They had no idea. And at this point, that company was no longer really in business. So they're back, as we've recently discussed. But yes, they were, this is, if you're going to leave stuff, please tell the person that you're selling the house to, how to use it. Because you're just setting them up for a really bad experience otherwise. Excellent. Okay.

Wonderful. Well, thank you. That was, appreciate that call. tie. Hopefully we helped a little bit there. But right now we have to go to a break and we're going to have more of your questions when we come back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB,

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Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of Where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual.

They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. We are back with Richard Gunther. Thank you, Richard, for joining us. I have a few more questions for you, so let's dive right in. Okay, the first one, another, this is the reverse of the story that we just answered, which is this is from Nicholas Martin.

This is another email he sent, and I'm going to run through what he said. So I'm planning to buy a house in the coming months, and I've started thinking seriously about the smart devices I'd like to install. Right now, I live in a rented apartment, so I've kept things fairly simple when it comes to lighting. I use Philip Hugh bulbs in the main rooms, hue switches, and cellars. and I've installed hue switches on top of the existing ones, which is far from ideal, especially for guests. And I'd also really like to make sure that if my network, Hugh Bridge or border router, so that would be the thread border router, goes down,

my lights still work like normal. And that's where things start getting tricky. It feels like the issue of how smart home devices behave during technical failures doesn't get much coverage. And then from what I've seen on Reddit, an increasing number of people are opting for smart switches over smart bulbs. This seems like a promising approach, but I'm worried it might mean losing the flexibility of RGB lighting, unless I use a decoupled smart switch that always stays on. But if I go that route, wouldn't the switch stop working properly in case of a smart home failure? I've read about Zygby and Matter binding as possible solutions, but this all feels way more complicated than it should be for something.

as basic as turning the lights on and off. And that's why I'd love to hear your take. Do you think the better approach is smart switches or smart bulbs or maybe some kind of hybrid setup? And if so, how would this work? The eternal question, bulbs or switches? Yeah. Richard, if you were starting from scratch, which would you go for and why?

You and I have both written about this in the past. And I'm on Team Switch, and that's primarily because most of my lighting is dimable, but not color-changing. Yeah. It gets more complicated when you want color-changing, as you indicated with your question regarding RGP lighting. And that's a problem that, frankly, even in high-end custom installations has not been solved in a way. that I think is user-friendly. Yeah.

We still have this problem where there's on-off and then there is switching between different color modes and how do you handle that in the space of one switch? And lots of companies are trying it. I don't think anyone's really nailed it well. Now, if you have smart bulbs and the primary thing that you want to do with a switch is just be able to control it and dim it, then yes, the switches that have a smart bulb. smart bulb mode. There are a couple vendors putting those out.

I know Zuz has them. In Aveli has them. Those are both for Z-Wave. G.E. Sync has this capability. The Lutron Aurora is an example of that. That may be one of the things that you're using when you talk about having a controller over your existing switch. It's a clever device, but you're right.

You're dependent on your smart home system. working to make that all work properly. That's a different question. Let's get to that in a second, but I'm curious where you are on Team Switch versus Bulb. Yeah, so it's been an internal problem in my home, for sure. And as I mentioned, I actually have some smart bulbs connected to a switch. So you can connect hue and color-changing smart, any smart light bulb, to a switch that is smart, as long as the switch that is smart is just on and off. It's when you want to dim that you get into issues. Mainly there's a whole electrical reason, but the way a dimming system works is changing the level of power to the light. And when you do that, you mess with the power and you get flashing.

I've had a smart light switch from Caseta Fry because I had it connected to a hue LED bulb. and then you have the horrible flickering when you're trying to control them. So it's just never a good solution that way. It's okay if you're just using a smart switch in most cases. That's the situation I have in my bathroom. But the problem there is I have to control them two different ways. So I have the turn-on bathroom switch and then I have adjust vanity lights as different phrases that I can use to talk to my smart assistant to get what I want, which is not ideal.

So I'm really interested in these switches that have smart bulb modes. I haven't been able to try any. It's why I got quite excited when you mentioned you have Innevelli switches, because I understand that they're one brand that does this. But it sounds like you haven't set those up with color-changing bulbs yet. I have not tried that yet. That's something that I still want to do. But yes, that is possible.

And then Akara is another brand I mentioned when I was talking about the ceiling light. So after I reviewed the ceiling light, they have come out. with a smart switch that can control their bulbs specifically. And this is, again, where you get into the smart lighting cabal, where you really, if you stick with one brand, generally you will get solutions like this. So Akara does have switches that have smart bulb mode for their bulbs and their light fixtures. Unfortunately, my smart ceiling light is in a room that does not have neutral wires,

so I cannot use their smart light bulb switch. So it feels like this is a problem that still hasn't been solved, especially because you don't want necessarily to always use one brand. One of the great scenarios for Nicholas here is that he is moving into a new home. And that's starting from scratch. I'm so jealous. I would love to start from scratch. Just do it all over because I think today there are better solutions. I think one of them in this scenario would be choosing a brand.

like Innevelli or a Kara that has smart bulb mode and doing both. Because if you want the color-changing lights, you want to keep using your hue bulbs, but you don't want to keep using their remotes, which work fine. And that's what I have in my kids' rooms of the remotes. That's how they control their lights. But it's not, as he mentions, not great for guests. And it's just not an ideal solution. I wish you would partner with someone maybe to come.

I mean, they do have the run less wire switches. but those don't, they also don't help with the color changing. You want to be able to control the light changing as well, the color changing. And so then they have, you know, buttons. This is another area that buttons are good. But yeah, I think what I'm hoping we're going to see, and he mentions here matter binding. And this is definitely future casting. This is not something that's really ready yet.

And I know, Richard, that you're going to have some thoughts on matter binding. But what this is going to do, essentially is allow you to bind a switch to a light locally. And this addresses your other question about reliability. So what will happen is that the light switch and the light bulb, and this could be multiple light switches and multiple light bulbs, will have like a local, almost wire, invisible wire connected to each other. And that will be sort of permanently ingrained in their memory. And even if your hub goes down, your internet goes down, anything goes down other than the power, they will still be able to control each other. So you flip the switch, the light will turn on.

And this is something that's part of matter. It's also something that is part of the Zigby standard. And I actually checked in with the CSA, which runs matter about this. And the Chris Leprey, the CTO said, you know, the major value here of binding these devices together is that is speed and reliability. So the switch talks directly to the light. It's instantaneous versus say like a button, which would then have to talk to a hub and then maybe check rules on the cloud and then reply and tell the hub to contact the light. So all of this could take, you know, less than a few seconds or under a second, but still not as fast as flipping a light switch, which is what we need. Right. So it's an exciting thing. It's not something that we've seen any brands adopt yet,

Akara has said that they're looking into it, but it's going to be a while, I think, until if this is even going to be a solution. But what is great about it is if it works in matter, you wouldn't need to use the same brands. So in theory, if your Phillips Hugh bulbs worked with matter binding and you're Akara smart switch worked with matter binding, you could bind them together. And that feels like a future I'm excited for. Richard, throw cold water over me. No, I agree. I agree. I just think we're a far way out for that. I mean, we do have this same sort of thing in Zygby. And frankly, it's not dissimilar from how Instion products work with each other. They directly communicate with each other without the need for that hub to trigger each other. So it is promising. It could solve a lot of these problems. You mentioned Akara in your hybrid situation. I think, think the best product that Akara offers now to help with this problem is their four-button scene controller. So they have a scene controller that has a switch in it that allows one of the

buttons to be a switch and control the actual load, so turning it on or off. And then the other three buttons can be set to trigger any matter scene. So that could be different styles of using the light, different colors or different moods that you want to set so that you have one to turn it on and then the others could trigger those scenes. You could even have those scenes potentially also turn the light on if you didn't want to have to manually turn it on first. So there's some options for you. We're just not fully there yet. No, no. So in the interim, Nicholas, I mean, you keep your hue bulbs, bring them along. They work with matter. And, yes, switches right now, I think it sounds like maybe the Akara switches with the scenes could be a good way of

controlling some of the devices or Innevelli switches with their smart bulb mode. Now, those work with any smart bulbs, correct? Those aren't just, they don't, because Inevelli doesn't make their own bulbs. Correct. Those would work with any smart bulbs. Yeah, it works with whatever smart bulb is working with your controller system of choice, which would either be something through Zigby, ZWave, or matter. And then, of course, the other solution if you're handy or you're getting an electrician to do all of this is the relays that we talked about earlier.

And those would connect your smart bulbs through regular switches to any smart platform that you like Shelley being one of the options there. Acarra also has relays too. So hopefully there's some solutions there for you, Nicholas. And we are going to jump to another question. This one is another hue and a carer one. This one is another bit of a head scratcher,

and it's an interesting one to kind of follow on from this last question. This is from Simon Salvin, and his question is, I have hue lighting and Akara wireless switches. These are all set up through the Apple Home app, and the switches can be temperamental at times. I see I can add the Hugh Bridge to Akara via matter, which I'm thinking could give me greater control setup in the Acara app. Would you advise this?

And would this still keep all the lights in the home app for controlling certain lights without switches and automations already created? Although I have the Acara M2 Hub, he points out. And he asks, should I be able to pair the Hugh Hub to that without matter? I'm sorry, this one is quite complicated. And I did reach out to Akara just to make sure we got this one right. And, you know, this goes to what we talked about before, about how Matter can sort of help you integrate smart lighting from different brands. Because what Akara has done recently, and the same as IKEA, as we mentioned at the top of the show,

is they've become Matter controllers, which allows you to add any matter devices to their ecosystem, just as you add the huge bridge to your Apple Home ecosystem, You can add anything to Akara and now IKEA and control through their app rather than through Apple Home. The question is here, though, can you connect to Hugh Bridge to an Akara matter controller? You can definitely do that through matter, but you can't, I'm afraid, Simon, do it with the M2 hub. It only works with the M3 hub. And this is where matter has been a bit difficult for people because there had been hoped that much of the support for older devices would exist,

with matter, but unfortunately that has not been the case, and a lot of companies have come out with newer devices like Akara's come out with its M3 Hub, which does support being a matter controller. The M2 Hub supports matter, but not as being a controller. I'm getting into the weeds a little bit here. But if you do this, if you connect your Hube bridge to the matter controller, Akara Matter controller, you'll be able to control the hue lights in the Akara Home app and automate them with Akara's excellent automation. engine. But you cannot then control them via Apple Home if you just integrate them into ACARA. To control them in Apple Home, you would need to generate a MATA code in the ACARA home app

and use that code to add the Hube Bridge to Apple Home. This is using MATTA's multi-admin feature that we haven't touched on, but this is one of the things that makes matter interoperable. It allows you to use any matter device with any matter compatible platform, which is great for smart lighting, especially if you live in a house that's divided. So your spouse has an Android phone and you have an iPhone and he wants to talk to Google and you want to talk to Siri. And this is one of the great features of matter, although it's been a little spotty, to start with. It does seem to be getting better. And I've found recently when I've tried adding

matter devices from one ecosystem to another, that it has started to work a lot more smoothly, which is exciting. Is this something that you've spent much time doing, or do you just stick everything with, stick with everything in Apple Home? I'm trying to keep most everything in Apple Home, but one thing that I did want to address here is, you know, it's easy to get frustrated that the hub that you've invested in isn't necessarily going to support the new features. Before anyone gets conspiratorial about that, that's almost always because of the capabilities of the chip set in the hub. Yeah.

For this controller capability, it does require, you know, more horsepower, if you will, to use an old-fashioned term. And some of the old chips just can't support that. So while some vendors were able to say, oh, yeah, our company. current chip set will support adding our devices into the matter ecosystem, they weren't necessarily capable enough to be a controller, which means stuff like running those routines and making all of those connections. Yeah. Yeah. And like the M2 does support matter as a bridge. It's just not going to be a controller. And this is something that we're only starting to see recently is

companies turning their hubs into controllers. And it's going to be interesting to see, because, you know, In theory, you could set everything up now in your smart home with Akara or IKEA and not need to use Apple or Google or Amazon if you don't want, which may appeal to people, especially as you can do all of both of those systems work locally. They both rely heavily on Zigby. Akara does have thread and IKEA, it sounds like, is also going to be working with thread. So it's nice to have these options, especially if you're only interested in lighting, I think, if you don't need all of the other. the stuff. And these, as we've pointed at, IKEA and Akara, do have pretty powerful automation systems for lighting. So it's exciting to see this. This is kind of one of the reasons behind matter, too. So it's exciting to see that companies start to do this. I think the other one that

has done it is Flick. Have you had much experience with Flick devices? You know, I had used Flick in its first generation and just haven't kept up with it as it's evolved. It's grown into something quite powerful, actually. Yes, and their latest device is a dial, and this is something that I really want to see more of in smart lighting, because having that, you said earlier, the physical controls are so important. They still are. I think it's important to remember that when you have smart home and smart lighting, that doesn't mean you don't need switches anymore. It's just that your switches can now do so much more. Potentially. Yes, potentially. And being able to sort of dial up the light and brightness, but also be able to be able to, sort of dial up the light and brightness, but also be able to be able to. to press a button and turn to your movie time scene or have everything turn to the colors of your favorite football team with just a tap, those kind of features with physical controls. You know, what makes smart lighting really fun, I think. Excellent.

Okay, so I think we've got time for one more quick one, which is along the same lines as we've been talking about here now that we dived into matter. We managed to get quite far without too much matter chat, which David would be proud of. But the last one here is from Shreis Gore, and he's asking about thread border routers. So I'm looking for a thread border router to improve my Matter smart home setup. Is it still worth buying something like the Google Nest Mini 2 from 2020, given that it's already more than four years old? I'm unsure if Google plans to launch a newer version, the reason I ask is that a few of my matter-enabled devices aren't. controllable via Apple HomeKit, and considering Siri's current limitations, I'm hesitant to invest

in a HomePod Mini. There's so many things we could unpack from that. First of all, is Nest making any more hardware? And second of all, what's going on with Siri? But the very first question answer I'm going to give you is, no, do not buy a Google Nest Mini too. Don't, don't, don't, don't. Mainly because it's not a threadboarder router, so it will not help. If you're going to go by any Google device right now to help with your thread network. And this is, we mentioned earlier, thread is a smart home protocol, a lot of lighting runs on it. It's one of the main protocols used by matter. Google has a number of different devices and we'll include a link into the show notes for the ones that are Matter controllers and threadboarder routers. But my suggestion

would be to buy the Google TV streamer 4K, which is their most recent product. So it is newer. It's not five years old. And it also doubles as a great streaming device. I've been using it, wrote a review of it, which we will also link in the show notes. And it's a perfect solution. Even if you have a device you like to use for your TV now, you could just plug this in and use it as a threadboarder router. It doesn't have smart speaker capabilities, though. So if you were looking for something that you could talk to, and the best option right now would probably be the Nest Hub 2. So the one that is not quite as old. I think that's like 2023. That is also a thread border router. What would you suggest here, Richard, do you think having more thread border routers will help his Matta smart

home set up? Honestly, the thing that concerns me is that it sounds like current control is through, well, I don't know. I can't tell if control is through Apple Home or Google Home. And so that's one of the things that's hard to understand. Because they mentioned both the HomePod and the Google Nest Mini, I'm not sure what ecosystem they're hoping to stay in. I understand the hesitation to drop 99 bucks on a HomePod Mini. One thing that you might want to consider is looking on eBay or on marketplace for folks that are getting rid of old HomePod minis. I think it's not that hard to find this stuff secondhand and you can do a full wipe and then incorporate them into your home. I mean, you mentioned the 4K streaming device. That's a $100 investment. That's the same price as the

HomePod Mini. But it does more. It does. It does. And I love Google TV. I'm a big fan. So if that's that you have in your home and might want to upgrade, that could be the perfect answer. And it does, I said it doesn't have a speaker in it as it's not like a smart speaker, but you can use the remote to talk to the Google Assistant and control smart home devices through that. It also has a great little smart home panel that will pop out while you're watching TV, you can press a button and control your devices through that. But yes, I agree. The idea here is you've got two ecosystems and which ones do you want to be in. And I use both of these ecosystems. And so, you know, then this is again where Matter is helping because I, you know, you can have everything in both and control one thing using your Google TV remote and say, trigger my movie scene.

But then you can also do that on your iPhone through your Apple home app or through the control panel. It's nice to be able to have that flexibility. We're starting to see more and more of that with Matter. But just to wrap up the thread question here, having a threadboarder router is important for your Matter set up. If you do not have one, I recommend getting one because if you do not have a threadborder router, you cannot use thread devices in your smart home. You can use matter over Wi-Fi. You cannot use thread devices. And there are a lot of great new thread devices out there, especially in the smart lighting space. And you only need one thread border router technically. More will help because they

create, they're part of a mesh network. And if one goes down, the other one will pick up. So to the point about failures in the smart home, having more than one threadboard a router. router will help. But you do not need to have a thread border router from the smart home platform that you're using. But yes, if you're using Apple Home and you add a Google Home streamer, you are adding a threadboarder router to your network whether or not it is an Apple Home device. So you're supporting your network and you're making it stronger. One of the problems with threadboarder routers right now is when you add a new one to your home, it could create its own network, which would not help you. The good news is that Apple and Google are some of the companies

that have actually done a good job at connecting their networks together. So you probably would be fine in this instance. It's Amazon and ERO and smart things that are still a little lagging in terms of making one healthy border router thread network when you add your devices. So as I've written about recently, this is something that all of the red manufacturers are working on and with the 1.4 release, which is out now by next year, I'm told, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. So as has been the theme of this episode, just wait and everything's going to get better. But I thank you so much, Richard, for your time and expertise. It's been really fun having you on. And any last pieces of advice you'd

like to leave for our readers when it comes to smart lighting? Sorry, for our listeners. Yeah, I think the thing that I would just say is, you know, if you're hearing all of this and you're thinking, geez, maybe I should just wait till I do anything, I don't know that you really need to go that far. I think there are some good solutions out there that are not universally, but largely compatible with most of the ecosystems and with matter. And so it's a really good place to start. And most of the devices that are available now are going to, you know, take you many years into the future. The thing that I would be cautious of is that inclination to say, oh, but here on Amazon, I can get four of those bulbs for the same price as this one from Hugh or Govi or

name the more well-known vendor. There's a reason they're so inexpensive. And in my experience, A lot of those lower-priced, lesser-known brands are not going to last as well or not going to future as well. And you'll be fighting more problems than solving them. Very good advice. Yes, it's worth investing a little bit of money into smart lighting. It pays off in dividends and far less headaches when it comes to setting everything up and troubleshooting in my experience. So wise words, Richard, very much appreciate your time this week. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Okay, that's it for the Vergecast today. To read more about today's topics, check out the show notes or go to theverge.com. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, smart home dilemmas, you can always email us at Vergecast at Vurge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 Verge11.

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This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Andrew Marino. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Jake Castanakis and the team will be here on Friday to talk about the news and I will be back next Tuesday. Thanks for listening.