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Google’s Pixel 8 series will again put the best cameras on the biggest phone - The Verge


Google’s Pixel 8 series will again put the best cameras on the biggest phone

Google’s Pixel 8 series will again put the best cameras on the biggest phone

Google’s Pixel 8 series will again put the best cameras on the biggest phone

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Sorry, small phone lovers: leaked specs indicate an improved ultrawide camera on Google’s larger Pixel. Hey, at least the curved screen is gone this time.

By Chris Welch , a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos.

Pixel 7 and 7 Pro from the back

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

If you’re a fan of Google’s Pixel lineup and want the best possible camera performance, there’s only been one real choice over the last couple of years: you buy the biggest phone. The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro share the same primary sensor, but the larger device has a superior ultrawide camera (thanks to its wider field of view) and the vaunted telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom. For the upcoming Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, it looks like the company will continue the trend of giving the pricier phone an optical advantage.

Last year, the telephoto lens was the big story, but in 2023, it’s reportedly the ultrawide camera that’s making a substantial leap — but only in one of the two phones, of course.

Android Authority has seemingly obtained the camera specs for Google’s next Pixel duo, which we expect will be introduced in October. Both will share the same 50-megapixel Samsung Isocell GN2 primary sensor, which is larger than the GN1 used in the Pixel 7 series and should thus capture even more light for your everyday shots. At least Google is maintaining parity when it comes to the camera you’ll be relying on most often (and in dark conditions).

The 8 Pro’s ultrawide will use the same sensor as the 7A’s main camera

But the ultrawide camera is where bigger changes await. While the Pixel 8 will continue using the Sony IMX386 that dates back to the Pixel 6, the 8 Pro is being upgraded to Sony’s 64-megapixel IMX787 sensor. As Android Authority notes, this is what the recent $499 Pixel 7A uses for its main camera. My colleague Allison Johnson found it to be more than adequate for a main shooter, so I can only imagine that the Pixel 8 Pro’s ultrawide captures will be more detailed and less muddy.

Like the Pixel 7 shown here, the Pixel 8 will be saddled with a lesser ultrawide camera — and no telephoto lens at all.
Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

On the bright side for Pixel 8 buyers, Google has at least widened the field of view from 0.67x to 0.55x; that puts it on par with the Pixel 7 Pro — the Pixel 7’s ultrawide didn’t feel very ultrawide, if you know what I mean — but the 8 Pro’s ultrawide will cram even more into the shot with a FOV of 0.49x.

The Pixel 8 Pro’s telephoto camera looks to again be a 48-megapixel Samsung system capable of 5x optical zoom. Perhaps most surprising of all, Google will be sticking with the same 11MP Samsung sensor as last year for its selfie camera. I’ve noticed Pixel 7 and 7 Pro owners complaining about how they appear on video calls compared to other recent photos. Ideally, Google has made refinements to the lens hardware (or in software) to produce better results for the Pixel 8 lineup.

I’m a big phone person, and based on the early leaks we’ve seen so far, Google has addressed my biggest frustration with the Pixel 6 Pro and 7 Pro; the curved display is finally history. So I’m excited for the Pixel 8 Pro’s debut this fall, but I still feel for people who wish Google would outfit the Pixel 8 with equal camera chops.

Just remember that, especially when it comes to Google, computational photography and software tricks are the name of the game. We might see the company’s mind-bending Magic Editor tool debut alongside the Pixel 8 series (if not before), and if you thought Magic Eraser was cool, this will mark an even more meaningful step into AI-based photo editing — regardless of what size phone you prefer.


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OnePlus Nord N30 review: midrange performance, budget phone problems - The Verge


OnePlus Nord N30 review: midrange performance, budget phone problems

The Nord N30 is a $300 phone that performs like a $500 phone, but it’s held back by a mediocre camera system — and last year’s Pixel 6A hovering over its shoulder.

By Allison Johnson , a reviewer with 10 years of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

OnePlus N30 on a desk with screen facing up showing homescreen.

The OnePlus N30 comes with a big, high-refresh-rate screen and some nice extras for $300.

The OnePlus Nord N30 5G is a good budget phone, even if it’s not quite the phone I wanted it to be. 

Battery life is excellent, and processing performance is well above average for its $299 price tag. There’s fast wired charging — because that’s OnePlus’ thing — and plenty of thoughtful touches you don’t always see in a budget phone, like stereo speakers, plenty of RAM, and NFC for contactless payments. These are all undeniably good things.

But it’s not all positives. The N30’s screen is a big, high-refresh-rate 6.7-inch display. But it’s also an LCD, which is a departure from the 60Hz OLED on last year’s model. On a phone this cheap, you can have one or the other, and OnePlus picked refresh rate this time around. The camera system is another wild card. Often, it’s just fine. But there’s some funkiness with its new 3x crop zoom feature, and depending on the Google Pixel 6A’s on-sale status as you’re reading this, you can do much better for not a lot more money.

The OnePlus N30 is the US variant of OnePlus’ Nord CE 3 Lite, positioned to sit on a wireless carrier’s shelves just above one Samsung A-series phone and below another. It’s likely to be a “free phone” for a lot of people trading in an old device, and if that’s the case, then I think it’s a worthy choice. If you’re paying out of pocket and the aforementioned Pixel 6A is available, well, then I think it’s a different story.

That’s one glossy back panel.

The N30 features the flat edges and screen that are in vogue now (and which I personally prefer to a slippery curved edge). The display is covered by Panda Glass, while the rear panel and exterior frame are made of plastic. I’ve definitely used budget phones that feel cheaper and flimsier, and I like the matte finish on the N30’s rails. 

I do not care for the glossy plastic back. Most people will use a case, but I don’t, and the back panel quickly turned into a smudgy mess of fingerprints. There’s also a significant scuff on my review unit. I’m sure I never dropped it, so the phone must have come up against my keys or a rough surface that wasn’t kind to it — all the more reason to use a case. And you won’t find an IP rating for dust or water resistance here, either — they’re not too common in phones around $300 anyway.

The screen is a 6.72-inch LCD with 1080p resolution, which is juuuuust enough pixels to cover this huge screen. Its top refresh rate is 120Hz, but it can adjust to one of five slower refresh rates depending on what you’re doing to save on battery life. It uses faster refresh rates to make scrolling and animations look super smooth, and it gives the N30 a nice level of polish and responsiveness that you don’t get with a standard 60Hz screen.

On the downside, the colors displayed by this LCD aren’t as rich as an OLED, and it’s a little hard to use in direct sunlight. Like all OnePlus phones, the N30 comes with a screen protector applied, but I found the display a bit easier to use once I removed it. It’s a bit reflective, and mine was already starting to bubble up.

The N30 includes 128GB of built-in storage (expandable by MicroSD) and uses a Snapdragon 695 5G chipset with 8GB of RAM, which is a lot of processing power for a budget phone. OnePlus did not skimp on these specs, and it shows: day-to-day performance is very good. I’ve been using some high-end Android phones lately, including the Google Pixel 7 Pro. The N30 feels just a beat slower if I’m really paying attention, but for daily stuff, it keeps up very well. The phone chugs a little with heavier tasks like running Pocket City 2, but that’s above and beyond what I’d hope for from a $300 phone. 

And can I talk about haptics for a second? I really like the N30’s haptics. Budget phones can feel a little buzzy and jarring, but I’d call the N30’s haptics polite yet reassuring. It’s a little thing, but it adds up to a good impression as you use the phone.

Battery life is another of the N30’s strong suits. There’s a huge 5,000mAh battery here, which easily lasted a day of moderate use for me, and often well into the next day. I thought nothing of it when I left home with a half-full battery on a day I’d be using the phone on the bus and coordinating an afternoon meetup with my husband. Sure enough, the N30 lasted the full day, even streaming some video on my bus ride. You can comfortably get four hours of screen-on time out of this battery, and I saw over five hours by the time I was down to single-digit battery life.

When you do need to plug in, there’s fast 50W wired charging to provide a significant battery boost in just a few minutes. In my testing, it took the battery from about 5 up to 35 percent in just 10 minutes. Like most other charging systems, it’s designed to charge more slowly as it gets closer to 100 percent to protect its overall longevity. And this is, after all, a huge battery, so a full recharge from zero to 100 takes about 45 minutes. Still, just 10 minutes on the charger will take you from oh-shit-where’s-an-outlet territory to cruising through the rest of your day free of battery anxiety. There’s no wireless charging available, but that’s rare in the under-$300 class anyway.

In other news, there’s a real, live headphone jack on the N30, praised be. OnePlus says the built-in stereo speakers go to 11 will turn up to 200 percent, which is an inherently silly concept that I refuse to engage with any further. All I can say is that, yes, it is very loud.

The N30 ships with Oxygen OS 13.1, based on Android 13. That’s great news since a lot of budget phones are still on earlier OS versions, but the less good news is that the N30 is only scheduled to get one OS upgrade with three years of security support. That’s unfortunately typical for a budget phone, but it’s really a shame here because the N30’s processing hardware will probably be able to keep up for longer than that. 

The N30 will be sold by T-Mobile and its Metro prepaid brand, but the unlocked version will work on all three major US carriers’ 5G networks. That’s more great news because the N20 couldn’t access Verizon’s network, so it was only really an option for AT&T and T-Mobile customers. I can confidently say that the N30 does work on Verizon — I’ve seen my review unit (with my Verizon SIM) access 5G, including the good mid-band Ultra Wideband 5G. I’m glad OnePlus sorted that out.

The camera is nothing special for a budget phone.

I have good and bad news about the N30’s camera. The good news is that it’s good in the ways that all modern smartphone cameras are good: photos in bright light show plenty of detail and nice color. The N30 uses a 108-megapixel main camera with an f/1.7 lens that bins nine pixels for better light-gathering in low-light conditions and outputs 12-megapixel images. 

It also uses this same camera for 3x “lossless zoom,” which is a newer technology that uses the pixels at the very center of the sensor for magnification rather than relying on digital zoom and upsampling. There’s a 16-megapixel selfie camera, as well as 2-megapixel macro and depth sensors — the latter helps out in portrait mode, and the former is not really worth anyone’s time.

In theory, I love having the 3x lossless zoom option here — no ugly artifacts from digital zoom, and you get two cameras for the price of one. In reality, it doesn’t quite work out that well. Images are sometimes very soft, almost as if the camera missed focus or something has gone wrong in the processing pipeline. I noticed this happening in situations with plenty of light and static subjects, so it’s either a bug or just an effect of this being kind of a V1 feature. 

In any case, I did manage to get some nice shots out of it, and you’re not going to find a proper optical telephoto camera on just about any other $300 phone out there. Best to think of it as a bonus, not a feature to rely on.

Back at its regular 1x focal length, the N30’s main camera struggles in dim lighting, especially with moving subjects. It tends to drop shutter speeds down to 1/13th and 1/10th of a second, which results in a lot of blur even if your subject isn’t moving that much. Details and colors also get a bit crushed under noise and noise reduction. I wouldn’t expect stellar low-light performance or tack-sharp portraits in dim indoor light from this budget phone, but I did expect a little better, especially from OnePlus, which has delivered surprisingly good budget phone cameras in the past. 

Video recording is limited to 1080p or 720p, both at 30fps. Clips in good light look fine, with capable electronic image stabilization to smooth out bumps from footsteps. Videos in dim indoor lighting suffer from the same problems as still images in the same conditions, but they’re acceptable.

If the Pixel 6A isn’t an option, then the N30 is a good budget pick.

I had high hopes for the N30, mostly because I liked the N20 a lot. And there are certain ways in which it’s the phone I was hoping it would be. For day-to-day tasks, it performs more like a $500 phone than a $300, with plenty of RAM to keep tasks flowing smoothly. Battery life is so impressive that I quit charging it overnight because it just wasn’t necessary. It’s also just generally nice to use: the haptics are pleasant, and scrolling looks smooth on the 120Hz screen.

Where the N30 lets me down is its camera and its screen. I like what OnePlus is doing with the 3x telephoto, and I think the next iteration of this feature will probably be much better. And the things this camera system struggles with are things that most budget phones struggle with. 

But there’s another phone crowding in on this space that makes the N30 harder to recommend: last year’s Google Pixel 6A. It’s been marked down to $349 with the release of the Pixel 7A. If it’s still in stock and the extra $50 is doable, then the 6A is the phone to buy. Its camera system is much more reliable, and it comes with midrange perks like an OLED screen and an IP67 rating for robust dust and water resistance. And even though it’s a year old, it’s scheduled to get two more OS upgrades and security support until July 2027, which is one more year in each category than the brand-new N30 offers. The 6A doesn’t have the ultra-impressive battery life of the N30 or the fast wired charging, but personally, I’d take a better camera and live with charging my phone every night. 

That said, if the Pixel 6A isn’t quite within reach or T-Mobile is offering you a free N30, I think it’s a fine option. It’s a lot of phone for the money — even if it’s not quite everything it could be.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Agree to Continue: OnePlus Nord N30 5G

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To use the OnePlus Nord N30, you need to agree to:

  • OnePlus’ End User Agreement and Privacy Policy
  • Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
  • Google Play Terms of Service
  • Install updates and apps: “You agree this device may also automatically download and install updates and apps from Google, your carrier, and your device’s manufacturer, possibly using cellular data. Some of these apps may offer in-app purchases.”

There are also several optional agreements that you need to get past during setup:

  • Participation in the User Experience Program and System Stability Improvement Program
  • Membership in OnePlus’ Red Cable Club
  • Assistant Voice Match
  • Back up to Google Drive: “Your backup includes apps, app data, call history, contacts, device settings (including Wi-Fi passwords and permissions), and SMS.”
  • Use location: “Google may collect location data periodically and use this data in an anonymous way to improve location accuracy and location-based services.”
  • Allow scanning: “Allow apps and services to scan for Wi-Fi networks and nearby devices at any time, even when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is off.”
  • Send usage and diagnostic data: “Help improve your Android device experience by automatically sending diagnostic, device and app usage data to Google.”

In total, that’s six mandatory agreements and eight optional agreements.


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Apple put 96Hz-capable screens in its Vision Pro headset - The Verge


Apple put 96Hz-capable screens in its Vision Pro headset

Apple’s Vision Pro displays run at 90Hz with HDR support

Apple’s Vision Pro displays run at 90Hz with HDR support

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Technical details on Apple’s mixed reality headset are coming out of WWDC developer sessions, including a bump to 96Hz for 24fps 2D video playback.

By Umar Shakir , a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge.

The Apple Vision Pro headset on display at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

Not this display, the ones for your eyes.
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple’s revealing that its new Vision Pro mixed reality headset is outfitted with displays that have a 90Hz refresh rate. The new detail comes in an online WWDC session for developers where Apple shares how 2D video and stereoscopic 3D video work in the headset.

It’s common to see 90 to 120Hz screens on tech from smartphones to PC gaming monitors, as it provides quicker responsiveness and smoother motion than slower displays. Apple has generally used 60Hz displays on everything it makes other than some of its “pro” devices like the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro that have 120Hz ProMotion displays. For a screen directly in front of your eyes, that added speed will make a big difference.

The Vision Pro screens can also automatically switch to 96Hz, which is designed for playback of videos that are running at 24 frames per second, like most movies. There’s also support for both standard and high dynamic range (HDR) content.

As UploadVRpoints out, 24 multiplies evenly into 96, keeping the frames of both the playback video and the displays at a consistent rate. If the displays were running at 90Hz with a 24fps video, it would look like frames are dropping or lagging.

The WWDC session video continues to talk about 3D video support and how content providers can use stereoscopic video, where left and right eye frames are merged instead of having an independent video view per eye. This matches how 3D movies work in theaters, where if you remove the provided 3D glasses, you’ll see an odd 2D image with slightly garbled perspectives.

Another cool detail is that video can be encoded using both MP4 or HEVC — which is the default codec used when recording video on iPhones. Specific to the headset, 3D videos can be recorded in multiview HEVC to support stereoscopic frames.

The Vision Pro supports 4K video playback, and its displays support up to 96Hz with HDR support.
Image: Apple

In our hands-on with the Vision Pro, we noted the device is the Retina display moment for headsets. Part of that holds true due to Apple’s inclusion of pixel-dense MicroOLED displays that are near 4K for each eye — but now, it’s clear that the high refresh rates really helped with the experience. And another WWDC session video explains how developers can keep smooth interactions by adjusting their app’s input response time below 8ms.

The Vision Pro is one of Apple’s most experimental pieces of hardware to date, and as a result, the company hasn’t published a clear technical specification for it like it normally does for new releases. But as WWDC continues through Friday, we might run into more surprises — or we’ll just have to wait until we get closer to the device’s early 2024 release.


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Apple Home: How to start a smart home - The Verge


Apple Home: How to start a smart home

How to start a smart home using Apple Home

How to start a smart home using Apple Home

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It’s had its ups and downs, but Apple’s smart home platform is in a great place right now. Here’s why I stuck by it all these years.

By Wes Davis , a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.

Illustration by Samar Haddad for The Verge

My smart home journey began, like so many others, with a poorly placed light switch. My partner and I had just bought our first house, and the switch that illuminated the kitchen was in the laundry room all the way on the other side, meaning we had to wander through darkness to get to it. I hated that light switch.

So what to do? Well, I could spend a bunch of money I didn’t have to hire someone to move it, try to do it myself and accidentally burn my house down with a bad wiring job, or take the plunge on a smart home. I took the path of least resistance (that’s an electricity joke) and got started on smartening up my house.

I started out with an Amazon Echo Dot and quickly found that I hated the skills system Amazon uses; plus, the sound quality of its little black puck was terrible. So I got a Google Home Mini. It looked nicer but had invisible touch controls, and the app felt half-finished. I could’ve stopped there, but driven by the sunk cost fallacy, I gave Apple Home a shot. 

After you start your Apple-centric smart home, the HomePod Mini can add more convenient voice controls.

Apple Home, formerly known as HomeKit (which still refers to its smart home APIs), is Apple’s nine-year-old smart home platform, started in 2014 as a Siri-driven experience. Amazingly, it had no app until two years later and no smart speaker until the company finally released the first HomePod in 2018. The Verge’s Nilay Patel loved the HomePod’s audio chops but said it suffered in many other ways, not least of which is its place in Apple’s infamous walled garden, making it a “lonely” device. It couldn’t distinguish between voices, couldn’t operate your TV, and could only handle one timer at a time. But I just wanted my lights to turn on and off, and for me, it seemed to do that better than the others, so I stuck with it. Apple has closed the gap since then in all of the big, meaningful ways, but it’s been a slow process.

Today, Apple Home’s advantages are mostly two-fold. First, there’s Apple’s easy-to-use, attractive Home app. I found Apple Home to be a breath of fresh air after using Amazon’s Alexa smart home app, which perplexingly hides most of its actual smart home controls in a tab.

Second is being so locked into the company’s ecosystem that you benefit from its strict requirements for Apple Home-compatible devices. Those requirements include the ability to control devices locally — which means you still get basic control from your phone if your internet service goes out — and features like HomeKit Secure Video (HKSV), which gives users encrypted cloud video storage and facial recognition based on users’ Apple Photos library, among other things (more on this later). Admittedly, though, this is a double-edged sword since compliance with Apple strictures has resulted in a more limited, spendy product choice. 

Apple’s system has, among the big smart home platforms, also seen perhaps the most enthusiastic support for the new Matter protocol, which is partially based on Apple’s platform and still in its early days. If you’ve invested in almost any recent Apple Home Hub — that is, an Apple TV or a HomePod — you’ll find that device is also a Thread border router. That’s important because Thread is the wireless standard to be used in many inexpensive smart home devices going forward. For more, our own Jennifer Tuohy has a great introductory guide on the subject.

Starting your smart home

If you’re going to go with Apple Home, you may want to start with an Apple Home Hub — as mentioned above, either an Apple TV (ideally from 2021 or newer) or a HomePod. If you’re planning to purchase a HomePod, be aware that If you get the newest version, you’re essentially only paying for better sound (which, again, is stellar) because the $99 HomePod Mini, at only a third of the price, brings all of the same functionality. The 2022 Apple TV 4K, starting at $129, is a powerful TV streaming box and probably the best such product for most people to buy anyway, though you won’t get Thread support, as it’s reserved for the 128GB version.

Whichever you choose, buying an Apple Home Hub enables you to control your smart home when you’re away and lets you share access with others, provided they have an iPhone. Without a Home Hub, things get less convenient, but you can still add and control smart home products with your Apple devices.

Smart light bulbs are a great way to add to expand your repertoire.

As for smart devices, start small. Smart light bulbs are a great jumping-off point, and I’ve generally had the best experience with Philips Hue, though setup is a little more involved for Hue bulbs than for, say, Nanoleaf’s Essentials A19. Both brands offer bulbs compatible with Apple’s Adaptive Lighting feature, which gradually tunes the warmth of the bulb throughout your day to be cooler or warmer, depending on the time.

For smart plugs, I’ve tried a few, and all have been iffy at one time or another. The best, though, have been my Eve Energy smart plugs. Eve’s plugs are not cheap but feel worth it, as they offer a built-in power meter function that tracks how much power is flowing through them, even offering an estimate of what that’ll cost you based on the last week, day, or minute of usage. The Eve app also succeeds where Apple’s Home app fails by showing how your Thread network is structured, which helped immensely when I had to troubleshoot responsiveness issues with my Thread devices a few weeks ago.

Picking the right smart home security camera is tricky

Smart home security cameras can be a good go-to next, though picking the right one is tricky. Go for one that supports HKSV if you have an iCloud Plus subscription, as that gets you 10 days of video history, the ability to set detection zones, and object recognition for people, animals, vehicles, and even packages. In addition to being able to view camera notifications on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, an Apple TV can show picture-in-picture streams from your cameras, which comes in handy when I’m watching TV in my basement and can’t hear knocks on my front door (of course, notifications can be turned off as well).

I use a pair of EufyCam 2C cameras, though there are reasons to be cautious about Eufy’s security practices. Otherwise, Netatmo and Logitech both make well-liked alternatives, as do Eve and Aqara. Be careful not to confuse Apple Home compatibility with HKSV support, though. Arlo makes fantastic cameras, for instance, but their support is limited to live video streaming and basic motion detection in the Apple Home app.

Motion sensors like this Aqara motion sensor P1 can offer peace of mind.

If you want to add peace of mind beyond what cameras offer, you can look for door and window sensors like those for Ecobee thermostats. The Aqara water leak detector actually saved my bacon once when a leak I’d patched in my basement sprung open in the middle of the night — my iPhone alerted me to it, waking me up so I could stop the leak before it got to anything important. Door / window and motion sensors can also be great for setting up automation, so your lights are on right after you walk in the room.

Finally, with enough HomePods (Mini and above) in your home, you actually may not need separate humidity or temperature sensors, as those are built in, though in my experience, they’re not as accurate as dedicated sensors. In addition, their built-in alarm recognition means you can be notified if your smoke detector goes off when you’re out of the house. Those features aren’t unique to HomePods, but having all of them in one device is. Some Amazon Echo speakers have temperature sensors and can detect sounds like smoke alarms but lack humidity sensors, while Google’s Nest speakers can detect alarms, but only if you pay for its Nest Aware subscription, and lack built-in temperature and humidity sensors.

Ecobee thermostats can work with door and window sensors.

I set up my own Apple Home system by slowly identifying pain points in my house that I thought a smart device would make better. I now have a mix of smart lights and smart dimmers; various environmental, motion, and leak sensors; outdoor smart security cameras; a smart garage door opener module (that is, shockingly, compatible with my ancient Automatic Doorman opener); and more. I don’t even know how many devices I own at this point because many of them are Zigbee devices that rely on various hubs, like my Aqara and Hue hubs, to connect to Apple Home. 

I collect information like I once did Pogs, and I love being able to find out the conditions in every part of my house — and being able to check on things there when I’m away. Various sensors have also allowed me to adjust my dampers for the best air distribution and helped me know where to place humidifiers and dehumidifiers for the best result.

Making it better

As I said earlier, Apple’s onerous certification program has resulted in a more limited selection and higher prices, which can be a big pain in the butt when you’re looking for smart home devices. But as Matter is rolled out more, we should see a lot of those limitations fall away as basic smart devices like light bulbs, switches, plugs, and sensors become more commoditized. It also means no more looking for HomeKit certification for device makers, as Matter is intrinsically cross-platform.

As Matter is rolled out more, we should see a lot of limitations fall away

But there are other things Apple could do better. Improvements to Siri are always welcome, as right now, it often refers me to my phone for certain queries, such as web searches or business information (though other times it gives me the answers I’m seeking through the speaker), and my phone never seems to be aware it’s supposed to be showing me something. It would also be great to see more third-party support for Apple’s assistant — two years after opening Siri to other developers for use, Ecobee is still the only company actually taking Apple up on the offer.

There are ways to get around Apple’s lack of third-party support, such as Home Assistant, an open-source project that adds customizable HomeKit support to far more devices than do so natively. I’ve never tried this myself, partially because I haven’t had a need and partially because it’s time-consuming and I’ve just never gotten around to it.

I’d also love to see some fun or more granular automations injected into Apple Home. There are hacky ways to get this to happen, but they’re obscure and require more technical know-how than many people possess. For instance, I have a scene that flashes green and yellow lights on a pair of Nanoleafs and plays Todd Rundgren’s “Bang on the Drum All Day’’ whenever I yell “Go pack!” at Siri — but frankly, I won’t touch that scene ever again because I still have no idea how I got the lights to actually do what I wanted them to. 

Should you use Apple Home? 

If you want more choice and don’t want to wait for Matter to truly take over (assuming it really does), Google and Alexa are your options — that is, unless you’re willing to invest your time, energy, and brain power into Home Assistant integration, an open-source project that adds customizable HomeKit support to far more devices than do so natively.

But if you want to have a smart home and you’re concerned about privacy and security, then Apple has the best track record for those things. And as the Matter protocol matures, choice and affordability limits will fall away. If you’re already in the Apple ecosystem, it’s almost no contest, as the company’s famous interoperability extends to its smart home platform, making for a much more synchronous experience.

Photography by Wes Davis / The Verge


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