Why Apple needs a smart home display

I’ve seen a drastic increase in the number of rumors last week about upcoming Apple Home hardware updates, all pointing to products coming soon. Let’s hope that’s true. The most prominent device may be a smart display. Apple is currently the only major smart home platform without an official way to make a shared smart home display.

This matters for viewing smart home controls, but in Apple’s case it could also bring other parts of your digital life, like calendar and photos, into rooms where you don’t have easy access to your iPhone. I love my iPhone, but I don’t want to touch its dirty screen while I’m preparing food. Siri AI’s newfound power makes my voice and visual feedback a natural place to manage reminders, see the doorbell camera, and check my calendar and weather. Given Apple’s prowess in software design, I’m sure they’ve come up with creative solutions for these scenarios, and I hope this long-rumored product finally ships and becomes an essential part of our kitchen workflow.

The hidden limitation of Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4

I’m really enjoying my new Apple Watch Series 12, but fitness YouTuber DC Rainmaker has pointed out an important detail about Apple’s new heart rate sensor. Apple’s study claims it has the most accurate heart rate sensor, but the important detail is that it only records a measurement when it has a high confidence of getting an accurate reading. This means you can go minutes without getting any recorded reading.

I’m not a medical expert, but I can see how this would probably be fine for many people measuring their heart rate, and potentially better than a super high or low reading that messes up trends. But if you’re sweating the details of your sweaty workouts, it might leave you with weird data gaps, as DC Rainmaker shows.

Nanoleaf MCP

Last week Nanoleaf announced a new model context protocol (MCP) to connect AI agents to their lighting platform. This is great to see more smart home platforms adding this kind of integration. I haven’t played with it yet, and it’s very much for power users right now, but I think these kinds of integrations are important to eventually making smart home automation much easier to set up. Don’t worry about all the conditional details; just tell your AI what you want to happen, and it can use MCPs like Nanoleaf’s to fill in the technical details.

The Schedule

Last week I published a video on 3D printing for my home and we had another live stream. This week includes Amazon’s fall Prime Day, and I’m sure some exciting content around it.

I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday,

Eric