Commoditization of smart lighting

CES was full of lots of exciting smart home announcements I covered in my two long-form videos about the event, but Matter lighting was definitely not a big part. Two years ago, the show had plenty of new examples of Matter lighting and putting smart lighting in new places. Aside from LIFX and Govee, I didn’t see compelling announcements around smart lighting. Three other lighting companies I closely follow in the space had a much more subdued participation in CES, with no new smart lights to announce. And while Govee had an exciting booth, it felt more like a refining year for their tech with a smaller number of new products. But people still want lights. IKEA is bringing their viral donut light to Matterin 2026 with more plans for 2027. I just don’t think smart lighting has lots of room for innovation, and it’s getting commoditized by big companies.

2016 and the smart home

You might have seen a recent trend on social media of people sharing pictures from 2016. A lot has changed in 10 years of the smart home. In June 2016, Apple announced HomeKit as part of “new Siri features and functionality”. There wasn’t even a Home app on iPhone like we have today. Ten years ago in January 2016, Amazon’s Echo was a year and half old. Nest was already a part of Google, but still operating as a separate company. Matter was years away, and Thread barely existed outside its inventors at Nest. Thinking about the present day, Matter 1.5, millimeter wave, Ultra Wideband, and AI-powered assistants look like seeds of tech that could make our smart homes look very different in 2036.

Apple Siri powered by Google Gemini models

Apple’s joint announcement with Google to use Gemini as the foundation for their foundation models makes sense. But I think there’s confusion of what this means. This does not mean Google sees your requests. According to The Information, Google invested a lot of engineering effort to get Gemini models running on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute and Apple’s devices. Apple’s models will still be customized by Apple and different than Gemini from Google.

We’ll see how this works when it ships, but it could be great for us end users, giving us the AI power of Google with the privacy of Apple. My biggest concern for the smart home is that I hope Apple can keep and improve fast responses to simple smart home commands while also handling complex LLM requests with Gemini-based models.

The Schedule

Last week I took a personal day off publishing this newsletter as I was furiously editing videos to post. This year I did separate smart home and robot videos. I also made a playlist full of videos from my fellow smart home creators who also covered the show. I still have a number of shorts that are loosely CES themed to publish, but moving forward I got research going on several new videos for the channel.

If you're reading this in your Inbox and you have a shipping address in the US, then you are already entered in my giveaway of an Aqara Smart Lock U400. This is the latest lock from Aqara announced at CES 2026 that supports Apple HomeKey with Ultra Wideband. I will do the drawing before next week's newsletter.

I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday,

Eric