Happy New Year! It’s past 11:00pm local time on Saturday night as I write this, and I just finished packing for CES. Let’s cut to the chase. In this edition of the newsletter, I want to focus on my top three missing products of 2025. These are products I was very excited about in January, but they never materialized. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about these products soon.

Schlage Sense Pro Smart Deadbolt

At CES 2025, Schlage announced an ultra-wide band powered smart deadbolt called the Sense Pro. It was also supposed to be one of the early locks supporting Aliro UWB. This is the new standard from the CSA, the group also behind Matter, that allows locks to work seamlessly across multiple smart home ecosystems. Unlike Matter lock support, Aliro works with advanced features like ultra-wide band walking up to your door to unlock it with an ultra-wide band enabled device like a smartphone. Schlage was early to Apple’s HomeKey with the Encode Plus. Hopefully, the Schlage Sense Pro will have similar timing.

Aqara Panel Hub S1 Plus for the US

Aqara announced and shipped many impressive products in 2025, but their smart touchscreen displays that were demoed at CES only shipped in other parts of the world. I’m hoping we see them come to the US sometime soon.

Next-generation Apple TV box

In 2025, Apple rebranded Apple TV+ to just be Apple TV, but they left the set-top box untouched, despite many rumors of an update. My guess is Apple will rebrand it as part of a family of home devices under the HomePod name later this year.

The Schedule

Today is the start of CES in Las Vegas. I’ll be there publishing all kinds of videos for you, and a recap of things here next Sunday. If you are in town, I’d love to see you at the panel I’m on about the responsive smart home. You need to have a CES pass (attendee or media) to get in.

I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday.
Eric