smart home

Bloomberg's description of OpenAI's first piece of hardware finally makes the thing concrete, and I am not sure that helps. It is doughnut-shaped, roughly the size of a hockey puck, screen-free, meant to be carried from room to room or just left on whatever surface is handy. Voice is the main...

Gurman's latest has Apple shipping a small square smart display, roughly seven inches, somewhere between October 2026 and early next year. Two variants apparently. Camera for video calls plus presence detection and user recognition, so the panel changes what it shows depending on who walks up to...

There was a piece this weekend about relying on Apple Home while travelling, and it flagged the thing people forget until they are already at the airport: none of the remote access works without a resident hub sitting at home. An Apple TV or a HomePod has to be there, awake and online, or the...

Every writeup of tvOS 27 leads on speed, because that's what Apple led on. Fine. But scan the feature list and it's AutoMix, Crossfade, video podcasts, Thread 1.4, a reworked Apple TV Remote, and a pile of smaller stuff. Four of those are entertainment features. The Thread one is quietly the...

Have tried a few smart home dashboards and the one that stuck is the least ambitious: the home panel on Google TV. It sits on the TV, shows the compatible lights, thermostats and cameras, and that is roughly it. The reason it wins is location. A dashboard on a phone means finding the phone...