Schlage Sense Pro

Preorders for this new lock start tomorrow. If it’s like the Schlage Encode Plus, those who don’t get in early will be waiting months to get one. Get your refresh buttons ready! That said, Ultra Wideband is a hard technology to do well, so I’m not promising it will be a flawless product.

What does Ultra Wideband mean? I had a chance to see the Schalge Sense Pro at the Unify Conference. It will work with Apple HomeKey Ultra Wideband at launch and support Aliro in the future for other smart home platforms. This means you just have to walk up to your door to unlock with a compatible iPhone or Apple Watch, and the door unlocks automagically.

Level Lock Layoffs

Assa Abloy, parent company of Level Home, quietly let go of much of the Level Home brand and is merging it with Kwikset. I loved Level Locks, and I hope their minimal aesthetic lives on in future products. If you have a Level lock, it should continue to work, but I wouldn’t buy a new one today without understanding the company’s questionable future.

Apple Price Increases

This week, Apple did what I predicted. They raised prices on Macs and iPads. Perhaps the biggest surprise to me was the price increase for the HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K. The latter is now $250. When you compare the A15 bionic, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage with something like a Home Assistant Green or Homey Pro mini, it’s still very competitive for a smart home controller. But in the streaming box world, it’s now even more of a leap in cost above the competition.

The positive view on this is that Apple hopefully has new updates coming and might not want price increases to be part of the conversation with the new version launch. That’s assuming the new versions aren’t yet another increase in price. With the way the memory market is these days, who knows?

The schedule

I hope you and your family had a lovely celebration for Prime Day. I published a video with my picks of good deals. We also returned to live streams on Friday afternoon. This week, I will hopefully have another video for you, along with a live stream on Thursday night.

Next Sunday, there will be no Sunday Scene newsletter due to the 4th of July holiday weekend here in the United States.

I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday,

Eric