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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, Apple HomeKit + Hue has supported this for a few years (fall 2020?), they call it Adaptive Lighting, and for me this has been a killer app.

It's kind of a bummer that Hue doesn't support it natively, but since I was already in the Homekit ecosystem, it was fine for me.

I've paired this with powerful Sowilo [1] light strips, which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness, and it's kept S.A.D. in relative check.

[1] https://sowilodesign.com I'm sure some people can come up with a cheaper solution via AliExpress than Sowilo's, but having a turnkey solution that integrated with Hue was essential for me.

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> which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness

I must add that full-color lighting has turned out to be a gimmick. But a wide "white" color range (what Hue calls "White Ambiance") has been the real game-changer for me. Sowilo does a great job with its 2200k to 6500k "white" range.

These kind of LED lights are called "CCT" for "Color Calibrated Temperature", if you're searching on AliExpress.

Adaptive Lighting also works with the cheaper Philips Wiz bulbs, provided you use HomeBridge. ( I'm using this plugin for Wiz support: https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme ) There's probably a Home Assistant plugin too ...

Wiz bulbs will also be getting Matter support within the next year, so we'll be able to add them to HomeKit "natively".

I haven't found anything to suggest that Philips owns or operates the Wiz brand? Where did you find that information? More for my own curiosity than anything.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz and https://www.signify.com/en-us

Wiz joined Signify in 2019. Signify is the new name for Philips Lighting (post spin out from Philips).

HomeKit adaptive lighting requires an always-at-home iPad or Apple TV to set it up. Until I have those I find manually setting a large amount of Hue schedules at various times to be OK.

Note that Apple has taken away the ability of the iPad to serve as a Home Hub in the latest iPadOS, and the HomePod or HomePod Mini can also serve as Home Hubs.

Just to be pedantic, the current iPadOS _does_ support it. But there will be an update to the Home software later this year that removes the ability for the iPad to serve as a home hub.

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-16/

> 14. The new Home architecture is a separate update in the Home app, and will be available in a software update later this year. It requires all Apple devices that access the home to be using the latest software. Sharing control of your home and receiving Home notifications require a home hub. Only Apple TV and HomePod are supported as home hubs.

I've been really confused by this regression of theirs. But I note that the shift will happen at the same time as they introduce Matter support, so perhaps that's related?

That's my suspicion as well! I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of the change.

I've been endlessly enraged that they would not allow a Mac Mini to serve as a Home Hub, while allowing a mobile device that may not be always plugged (and thus may run out of battery or not be home) in to serve as one.

At least it's consistent now.

They probably never wrote any of the software for anything but iOS

First get people hooked to HomeKit automations using their iPad they already had, now take that away and upsell an Apple smart home speaker.

I've been doing it with Hue schedules too for a while. The Hue app does have automations support of rules based on Sunrise and Sunset. It's not quite as smart as HomeKit adaptive lighting because you can not, say, turn off lights during sunrise and expect them to wakeup in your post-sunset mood at the right hour, but if you are automating all lighting with the Hue hub alone and never using switches, it seems to work just fine.

Another happy HomeKit + Hue user. I have all my lights set to adaptive lighting and it's great!

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