On this week’s episode of the Smart Home Insider podcast, Apple’s smart home vision begins to come into focus with fresh leaks on its imminent products.
Guest host this week is Raj Sundar who serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Xthings. Xthings is the parent company of both Ultraloq and Ulticam that focus on smart home security with access control devices and cameras respectively.
Before getting into the interview, we round up all of the latest news for the week. Starting out was a series of new leaks on Apple’s upcoming devices, stemming from the Xcode iPhone Duo simulator.
By decompiling the code, people were able to search through the code for references to the as-of-yet-announced smart home display. A number of small things were uncovered recently.
During setup of the smart display, users will be prompted to create a photo face. This is similar to the portrait face on Apple Watch or iPhone.
There are four versions of the face, one to match each of the rumored colors. The smart display seemingly will come in starlight, space gray, silver, and rose pink.
Additionally, there were two smart home faces found for the iPhone Duo that will likely ship on the smart display. One is a camera view showing up to nine camera feeds and the second is a modular face that will show various home accessories.
Other rumors confirm a long-held belief that Apple won’t be supporting Face ID on the tablet. Rather, it will use facial recognition.
This makes sense as Face ID would not work from across the room. Face ID works by projecting infrared dots on your face and scanning them with an infrared camera which is hard at a distance.
Finally, Bloomberg has reported that Apple’s J450 security camera will not have real video recording. Rather, it will be low resolution and use Apple Intelligence to describe or understand what is happening in a room.
Unrelated to Apple, SwitchBot has a new pair of bar lights. These RGBICWW bar lights have 12 independently controllable zones and support Matter over Wi-Fi.
The rest of the episode is devoted to interviewing Raj Sundar. We get into the recent launch of the Latch 5 Pro, Bolt Pro, and Bolt Mission.
Xthings has been an early Matter adopter and Raj shares insights into that development. Additionally, Raj talks about adding Aliro to its smart locks.
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