Apple's Latest Macs and iPads Have Hidden Smart Home Thread Radio
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
A. Stops assigning my 2018 HomePods as the home hub, which they are incapable of doing as they cannot act as Thread routers, so whenever they get elected to lead the reliability of scene changes and automations go down the tubes.
B. Rewrite/redesign the Home app to not be a colossal pile of garbage. It's awful on the iPhone, worse on the iPad, barely functional on the Watch, and a complete joke on the Mac.
Also, putting a Thread radio on a Real Computer should make the protocol easier to experiment with. I would love to see more hackable utilities to inspect my Thread network.
First time I've heard of Thread.
>Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products
An improvement for who? Considering that bluetooth is used extensively to track people, I wonder what this will be used for. At this point I'd really like a laptop without any radios at all, or at least hardware switches to keep them off.
FWIW, this feature is common on older thinkpads. I really enjoy having a switch on the outside of the laptop to quickly toggle the radios, its a shame they're totally absent on newer laptops.
I will agree though, that hardware switches for these radios, even if unergonomic (say, only accessible on the logic board), should be there.
Any other takes?
There's likely a feature in iPadOS 18 or macOS 15 that will take advantage of it. It's possible we could hear about it at next week's WWDC [1].
;)
is apple enabling a bunch of nest/ring/foo business models?
Just a smart bulb itself is not really how you use that. For it to make sense you already have some kind of a gate/central device that you use to interact with the whole smart ecosystem. Such gate is often already Internet connected device (be it a Vendor specific hub, Home Assistant etc.).
An iPhone can do harm here as much as my weird Netatmo hub I have to use with my radiator valves...
Presumably the fear here is that iPhones/ipads/macs will be border routers by default and since they likely have internet access they would "force" the system to accept messages from outside the mesh.
No. Thread is a mesh networking protocol for smart home devices. A light switch, window sensor and a dehumidifier can be linked together. The light switch and the dehumidifier could be far enough apart where there would be connectivity issue; using thread, they can talk to each other via the window sensor.
I believe they're using the IPv6 non-routable address space. The way to remotely access these devices is through a border router, like a HomePod or an Apple TV. And because it's an open standard, all of the big guys—Apple, Google, Samsung and others—have come together on this standard, making it easier to mix and match smart home devices that previously only worked in Apple's or Google's or whoever's proprietary ecosystems.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/23820078/matters-biggest-problem-ap...
All I can think of is "Smart TVs" and the care you need to take to keep them from going online to exfiltrate your data. They won't ever need your Wifi credentials if they can just piggy back on this.
That's what Amazon Sidewalk was designed to do. Your Alexa devices that already have network access would just gracefully allow other sidewalk devices network access too.
Amazon IoT for example worries me because the lack of network boundaries, so like that I wonder if the same challenge arises with Thread.
I wish all phones and tablets had an FM/AM tuner to play over the air content without an internet or cell connection.