How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
Motion sensor is not the same as a presence sensor. Presence sensors often include a PIR sensor in addition to several other sensors to detect if someone is in an area.
Also how much are we saving flipping lights off for a few hours in the age of LEDs? Most of my electricity bill is either fixed costs or from heating water.
I recently installed a basic flat, round, white LED overhead ceiling light in a bedroom that's been repurposed as a home office (replacing a very old dual screw-bulb center of ceiling fixture on the octagon box), and I don't know if there's any actual savings in the new unit. The previous thing had two "same size/shape as an incandescent" 11 or 12 watt white LED "bulbs" in it, the new unit is specced at 28W. It provides a more evenly distributed light and has a toggle switch to choose between three different color temperatures.
At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.
Across my house, I think I have about a kilowatt or two of LED lights, mostly in the form of ceiling cans at 16W each. Running everything full brightness would thus be about $0.30-$0.50 per hour. It’s the paradox that the same rooms probably would have used the wattage with the old incandescents, it just would have had a lot more shadowy corners.
Do you grow any plants in your home? An average family home will have around a tenth of that energy consumption if you turn on all the lights. 200 watt tops. That is 25 LED bulbs of 8 watt.
Yes almost 60 sounds right, and I keep the dimmers at about 50% usually since it’s a small condo. But it also very /evenly/ illuminated. The builders chose this, not me. Your typical incandescent hallway or stairwell probably used to have 1-2 lights (60-120W) to cast enough light to get around. Now that same hall in modern LED style might have 4-6, because it eliminates shadows, not because it makes it brighter in a given spot. Same for the kitchen—it probably used to have one central 100W light and 50W over sink, and now a modern style build in the same space might have at least 6 LED ceiling lights+6 under cabinet lights
About 1700sf with taller than normal ceilings. It’s unnecessary bright in the evening, but blends with sunlight in the day. I feel like our brains must interpret light differently depending on the angle it reaches the eye. I used to rent a place that was 900sf with normal ceilings, which had 4 of those tiny sort of ones in the living room, and it was painfully bright in the way they concentrated the light into spots so we never used them (unfortunately they didn’t have dimmers)
I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)
This immediately made me think of "smart water bottles" that detect how much of your drink has left the vessel. They can detect what kind of drink they contain and what temperature it is. And so on.
You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.
The fact that a camera is involved is what is jarring, I think. There's plenty of less creepy ways to achieve what other smart home platforms do, which makes one wonder what else it is being used for. If we are to trust them, the camera won't record... until the terms of service update and it gets buried in legalese and surprise, everyone gets opted into having all of the camera's sensors constantly beaming to a cloud for myriad purposes.
What investor money? This is purportedly an internal project by a large tech company. And what hype? This is speculative article based on second-hand leaked information.
Well, fair point. The investors are the people buying Apple stock I guess. But this is what they're chosing to promote as a benefit for the trillions being spent on GPUs, servers, data centers, power, water, and all the rest of it? Turning off the lights when you leave the room?
I live in a 1700sqft space - not small, but not large. I have ~15 separate banks of overhead lights that were built into my builder grade condo when I bought it, and probably 20 light fixtures (lamps, accent lights, etc) I've added myself. If you are even remotely interested in design, decor or lighting it's easy to end up with a similar number of lights in an average sized space. When I walk through the door, the scene sets itself perfectly based on the time of day. If I didn't have that automation, I'd probably end up turning on the nearest 1-2 lights out of convenience. It's a huge quality of life improvement. Today it takes some up front effort to get it set up, but it's getting easier and easier and more people will realize the benefit.
I think their point is that a simple infra red sensor like outdoor motion detector lights will do what you need. There's zero need for a camera to do this. Massive, massive overkill.
There's a fairly large and thriving market in zigbee and/or zwave based "human presence" sensors which can serve dual duty as motion detection via infrared and also using very basic radar, for both turning on/off lights and also to provide data to a DIY security or automation system in Home Assistant.
There have been significant price drops in small modules for short range, rudimentary V-band (60 GHz) radar to do this sort of thing, which companies can built into their consumer-priced product.
I think some of the better ones are a little bit too power hungry to be entirely wireless on battery, and have a USB-C port in their rear, you're meant to plug it in persistently to a small USB charger and tuck the cable away somewhere.
> There's zero need for a camera to do this.
That's like saying that you don't need a whole PC to do local AI inference because it can run entirely on GPU. The point is that the lights example is just the beginning.
Fair, I won't comment on whether or not a camera adds any value to this use case specifically. I can imagine a lot of other ways that a camera could be useful. Today I only plug in a google home camera when I'm gone for extended periods of time (e.g., on vacation) because my partner and I don't want a camera pointing into our living space at all times.
This seems to be the first instance I can think of where a vendor is trying to take a middle road of extracting more value from a camera while also having a more conservative view on privacy. We'll need to see exactly what that means in practice, but I'm glad someone is finally broaching the question.
This sounds very cool. I have home assistant and have fiddled around with presence detection but I feel like its pretty niche and preference dependent. My gf did not like it in the bathroom and getting the timing to work perfectly required a ton of fiddling. Maybe apple will get it right but I don’t think their core customers care about home automation to this degree.
I have three lights in the living room that I toggle just before sunset manually with a switch. Instead of three separate switches, my electrician made it so that one switch turns on all three lights at the same time.
I really don't see it as a "huge quality of life improvement" to not have to walk to the light switch. I typically combine it with a trip to the kitchen to grab some water or a snack.
About 10 years ago I was browsing Home Depot and found an electronic Bluetooth enabled egg carton. It paired with a mobile app to let you know you were out of eggs. Don’t know what the target market for that product was either.
So your teenager doesn't flip the light switch. The LED bulb now continues to draw 8 watt of power. That is less than what a security camera that monitors room activity draws.
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
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judge2020 · · focus · HN ↗
But ya, it's not that hard, the only place I've found a motion sensor to be useful was in the garage.
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walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.
manwe150 · · focus · HN ↗
artisinal · · focus · HN ↗
NewJazz · · focus · HN ↗
manwe150 · · focus · HN ↗
NewJazz · · focus · HN ↗
manwe150 · · focus · HN ↗
I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)
mynameisash · · focus · HN ↗
You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.
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wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
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walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
There have been significant price drops in small modules for short range, rudimentary V-band (60 GHz) radar to do this sort of thing, which companies can built into their consumer-priced product.
I think some of the better ones are a little bit too power hungry to be entirely wireless on battery, and have a USB-C port in their rear, you're meant to plug it in persistently to a small USB charger and tuck the cable away somewhere.
garbagewoman · · focus · HN ↗
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lostmsu · · focus · HN ↗
That's like saying that you don't need a whole PC to do local AI inference because it can run entirely on GPU. The point is that the lights example is just the beginning.
kbos87 · · focus · HN ↗
This seems to be the first instance I can think of where a vendor is trying to take a middle road of extracting more value from a camera while also having a more conservative view on privacy. We'll need to see exactly what that means in practice, but I'm glad someone is finally broaching the question.
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artisinal · · focus · HN ↗
I really don't see it as a "huge quality of life improvement" to not have to walk to the light switch. I typically combine it with a trip to the kitchen to grab some water or a snack.
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<a href="https://youtu.be/Ny8-G8EoWOw?si=Z9HUQbfZoPmCBxO3" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Ny8-G8EoWOw?si=Z9HUQbfZoPmCBxO3
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