Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
There are two kinds of smart home.
The kind that impresses other tech people. And the kind your family can actually use when you're not home.
I've slowly learned to only care about the second one.
The Tech My Wife Actually Approves Of
This is the stuff in my house that everyone uses without me hovering nearby.
🧠 Homey Pro: the hub everyone can actually use
If you want one smart home hub that the whole household can use — Homey Pro is it.
It's a simple box. You plug it in, link in as many services as you want, and it gives you one clean dashboard that doesn't need a degree to understand.
Here's why it earns its place:
Works with over 1,000 brands so you can hook up basically anything
Runs locally: automations keep working even if your internet drops
No subscription for the good stuff: Advanced Flow, dashboards, energy tracking all included
One dashboard the whole family can read
Easy to set up. Easy for everyone else to use. Recommend.
💡 Aqara: the stuff that keeps working when everything else falls over
A big chunk of my house runs on Aqara — light switches, motion sensors, even some of the lights.
The clever bit is that the basics keep working locally. So if the hub falls over, or the house "crashes" so to speak… the normal switches still behave like normal switches.
Nobody's standing in a dark hallway because a server somewhere had a bad day. The light switch still turns the light on.
That reliability is exactly what you want from the bits of your home everyone touches every single day.
Source: Gizmodo
👨👩👧 Pick one ecosystem as a family (and stick to it)
Pick one ecosystem for the whole family: Apple, Samsung, or Pixel. Then resist the urge to mix.
Because once everyone's on the same platform, the family-admin stuff gets dramatically easier:
Find My / location sharing — know where everyone is
Screen time — actually monitor the kids' usage
Parental controls — all in one place
Lost device? Found in seconds
📺 Apple TV: almost boringly reliable
Apple TV just works. Same simple interface, every single time. No apps to wrangle, no surprises.
Compare that to my LG TV, which keeps nagging me to sign in or install a software update… and then every update quietly reinstalls the bloatware and undoes the home screen I spent ages tidying up. Maddening.
If you don't want to be the family's TV tech support, just put an Apple TV on it.
✅ The wife-approved shortlist
If you want… | Get this |
|---|---|
One hub the whole house can use | |
Switches that work even if the hub dies | |
Easy family tracking & screen time | One shared ecosystem |
A TV interface that never changes on you | |
To stop being the household IT department | All of the above |
What's the least "wife-approved" bit of tech in your house?
📱 Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with a friend who’s as obsessed with tech as you are:
Over on my second channel (where I keep things a bit more casual and just talk through the latest tech news) I'm taking a proper look at the new Steam Machine.
It's a genuinely unusual bit of hardware, and the price has had a few people raising eyebrows. So I wanted to break down whether it actually earns it.
Whether the premium price is actually justified
A full walk through the hardware specs
Who this thing is actually for and who should skip it
How it stacks up against a standard PC build
Marketing hype vs the practical reality of owning one
The Weighted Companion Cube currently sitting on my desk
and more…
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