Smart Home
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Anker has built a smart home hub whose main selling point is that your footage never leaves your house. MindBase, announced at IFA in Berlin on September 3, is the company's first AI home hub, and it holds up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household data and family photos. No monthly fee to keep last Tuesday's doorbell clip, and no data center in Virginia sitting on video of your kitchen.
That runs against how the smart home has worked for most of the last decade, and it was the most interesting thing in a lineup of roughly 22 Anker products at the show. It's also the claim worth checking hardest, because Anker is the company that already made this exact promise once and broke it.
Click to continue reading Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud
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Ugreen Built a Smart Home That Skips the Cloud. The Big One Costs $19,999
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Your security cameras are almost certainly shipping video to somebody else's server right now, and you are probably paying a monthly fee for the privilege. Ugreen showed up at IFA in Berlin with a lineup built on the opposite idea. The box sits in your house, the footage stays on it, and the AI that reads that footage runs on the same machine, with no subscription attached.
There are three of them, and the spread is enormous. The HomeAgent HA100 lists at $1,799, the HA100 Pro at $5,999, and the MasterAgent MA100 at $19,999. Early backers pay roughly half. Nothing ships until late January 2027 at the earliest, and the MA100 not until July of that year.
Click to continue reading Ugreen Built a Smart Home That Skips the Cloud. The Big One Costs $19,999
Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home,
Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.
Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.
Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Dyson spent six years building a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth. The CameraJet is up for pre-order now at $499.99 in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, and it ships September 8. It brushes, flosses and rinses in one pass. The seeing part is the whole pitch. A camera under the brush head finds the gaps between your teeth and fires water at them, so you never have to aim.
That is either the most Dyson product ever made or five hundred dollars for a toothbrush. Both are true.
Click to continue reading Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Smart Home,
When it comes to home entertainment, most people think they need a bigger TV to get a more immersive experience. But you don't need to drop thousands on a massive new panel. True immersion is less about the screen itself and more about the space around it.
The Govee TV Backlight 3 tackles exactly this. It bleeds your content onto the wall behind your TV. This expands your viewing area beyond the bezels in a way that is incredibly eye-catching.
What is in the box
Govee ships everything you need in one package. You get the LED strip, a camera bar to monitor the picture, a control box, corner clips to keep things stable, orange calibration squares, and a power adapter.
You have two sizing options depending on your setup. The 11.8-foot version covers 55 to 65-inch screens. The larger 16.4-foot version fits 75 to 85-inch TVs.
Click to continue reading The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make
The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
The Amazon Echo Dot cost $49.99 last week. It costs $79.99 now, a 60 percent jump that Amazon made overnight with no announcement. Fortune caught the change across Amazon's hardware lineup and got the company to confirm it.
Amazon's explanation is the one every hardware maker is giving this year. A spokeswoman said the consumer electronics industry is facing steep increases in memory and storage component costs, and that Amazon absorbed them for as long as it could before adjusting prices across its product lines.
Click to continue reading The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason
You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech, Videos,
You bought the thing. It's sitting in your house. The box listed the features, you paid the money, the return window closed. So you own it, right? Here's the uncomfortable answer I landed on after digging through more than a decade of firmware updates, lawsuits, and shutdown notices: a company can sell you a product, wait out your return window, and then reach back into it to slow it down, strip its features, or kill it entirely, without anyone ever touching the hardware sitting in your living room.
Click to continue reading You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Rumors, Artificial Intelligence,
Picture a metal doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck sitting on your kitchen counter. No screen. Small moving parts that shift when it answers you, and lights that glow when it's listening. That is the first piece of hardware OpenAI wants to sell you, and Bloomberg says it will cost somewhere between $300 and $400.
Mark Gurman's report gives real shape to a device we've only heard described in fuzzy terms since July. It's a speaker with no display, built to be picked up in one hand and carried from the kitchen to the laundry room to the bedroom. It runs on a battery. It has speaker grilles, microphones, a camera system, and sensors that feed it information about whatever room it's in. Jony Ive is designing it.
Click to continue reading OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around
This Might Be the Smartest Way to Clean a Pool (Beatbot Sora 30 & iSkim) (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Product Reviews, Videos,
Keeping a pool clean sounds simple until you are the one trying to keep leaves, bugs, pollen, dirt, sand, and that weird waterline grime under control right before people show up. In this video, I’m taking a look at a different approach from BeatBot: instead of asking one robot to do everything, the Sora 30 handles the floor, walls, and waterline while the iSkim patrols the surface.
This Robot Pool Cleaner Scrubs the Part Everyone Hates! (MOVA Diver A10) (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Product Reviews, Videos,
The MOVA Diver A10 is a cordless robot pool cleaner built for the part of pool ownership nobody talks about until they are already standing outside with a skimmer, a brush, and a weekend disappearing in front of them. It uses a camera, six sensors, and 3D mapping to understand the shape of your pool before it starts cleaning, then moves through the floor, walls, edges, and waterline with a lot more purpose than the old bump-and-hope pool bots.