Roger Fingas
U.S. homebuilder Brookfield Residential on Wednesday announced that all of its new southern California communities will by default come with Apple HomeKit accessories, making them controllable via Siri or iOS 10's native Home app.
The first build to get HomeKit will be the Delano neighborhood in Irvine's Eastwood Village, Brookfield said. Other early entries will include ones in Playa Vista, Chula Vista, San Marcos, Azusa, and Ontario Ranch.
Standard HomeKit equipment will include Lutron Caseta lights, the Honeywell Lyric T6 thermostat, the Schlage Sense smart deadbolt, and finally the Ubiquiti Wireless Access Point, to provide good Wi-Fi coverage. Newer HomeKit accessories will be added as they come along.
Other U.S. builders supporting HomeKit include KB Home and Lennar, but Brookfield appears to be the first making the platform standard, rather than an upgrade.
Smarthome accessories are often expensive to buy on their own, limiting their adoption. They can become more practical in the context of a mortgage however, adding just a small amount to monthly payments while also potentially boosting resale value.
Apple may be in tighter competition for the smarthome space than it anticipated, largely because of the surprise success of the Amazon Echo and its AI assistant, Alexa, which is even being integrated into HomeKit-ready devices like the new Ecobee4 thermostat. Google, too, has stepped into the market with its Nest accessories and the Google Home smartspeaker running Google Assistant.
Apple is believed to be developing a smartspeaker of its own, based on Siri and featuring high-end audio. It could be announced as soon as next month.
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4 Comments
Smart move. I'll trust Apple to provide a working, SECURE home automation environment. Alexa and Google-crap are just fads. Junk makers whose sole purpose is to harvest your private info.
The Irvine neighborhood is pretty high end. Those HK deadbolt look really cheap. On the front door I would want something like a brushed nickel mortised in Baldwin. Maybe you could put the HK deadbolt on the interior door separating the garage from the house. I usually enter my home through that door anyway. The other thing is that I would want a HK alarm system, which could be added wirelessly, but I would rather have wired sensors. In addition it would be nice to have HK outdoor lighting. Of course you need to plan for the other options that buyers might want like window shades which will need power outlets near the top of the windows. When building a new home you should plan for other sorts of outlets like cable, ethernet, outdoor speakers, etc. Do whatever you can to never need to tear into walls to add stuff.