Technology company giant Apple has also entered the smart home field in the Chinese market.
Jiemian News recently discovered that Apple China’s official website has developed a separate home section (Apple Home). The page shows that the home furnishing sector is mainly divided into three categories: HomePod, Home App (family App) and smart home items.
Among them, HomePod is Apple’s smart audio product, which can be connected with Apple’s smart home products and controlled by human voice recognition; Home App is the system software that comes with the iPhone or iPad. According to the official website, adding HomeKit or Matter accessories can control smart home accessories in different areas of the home, such as ceiling lights in the hall, ceiling fans, showers in the bathroom, and so on.
From a functional point of view, both are the center of the Apple Home smart home ecosystem, executing offline and online commands respectively.
Up to now, Apple’s official website has launched nearly 30 smart home items, and the product types mainly include cameras, light bulbs, door locks, switches, routers, sockets and so on.
It is worth noting that Apple’s smart home items are all products of other brands and are produced by third-party manufacturers. There are not only leading smart home brands like Lumi, but also niche brands like Xiaoyan Smart.
This means that Apple Home does not produce smart products by itself, but provides a sales platform for smart home brands, which need to be certified before they can access Apple’s ecosystem.
Judging from the prices sold on the official website, the product pricing of Apple Home is not as “cost-effective” as Xiaomi.
A set of Xiaoyan’s smart life kit is priced at 680 yuan, which includes four products including a home center hub, door and window magnetic sensors, smart sockets, and sensor switches; Lumi’s smart door lock is priced at 1,798 yuan, with natural alarms and smart smoke The average price of the alarm is 248 yuan; the price of the Nanoleaf Shapes series of intelligent hexagonal light panels is nearly 1,500 yuan.
However, only a small number of products are sold online, and more are sold in Apple’s offline stores. Lumi told Jiemian News that more than 240 products have been connected to Apple Home.
As a technology giant, Apple has already laid out the home sector as early as nine years ago. In 2014, Apple officially released the HomeKit suite on the iOS 8 system, and on the iOS 11 system two years later, Apple released the Apple Home app (family app).
In 2019, Apple and Google, Amazon, Samsung and Zigbee (now renamed CSA Alliance) established an organization called Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP), which stated that it aims to solve the interconnection problem between smart home products, and Prepare to plan the birth of Matter, a new smart home connection protocol.
Jiemian News learned that some of the smart home products launched earlier have been scattered in other sections of the official website.
Since each smart home brand has its own ecosystem, data security settings, and different functions of the same product, “exclusion” is a common phenomenon. At present, the mainstream smart home connection protocols on the market include Zigbee, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but home products between different protocol types cannot establish connections.
According to a report by “Ai Faner” on the Apple Home team in October last year, the Matter agreement is different from the proprietary agreements that would constitute brand barriers in the past. Matter can realize the connection of smart home devices between brands.
In October 2022, the Matter 1.0 version and certification plan will be officially released. At the same time, Apple updated its support for Matter devices in iOS 16.1, becoming one of the first systems to support Matter devices.
Cecilia Dantas of the Apple Home product marketing team said that what Matter really brings about is that when users walk into a store, as long as the device bears the Matter logo, it can be used with existing home systems, regardless of compatibility. The problem.
According to CNBC reports, 280 companies currently support the Matter standard, including ADT, Assa Abloy (producing August Home and Yale smart locks), Ecobee, Facebook, Haier (the parent company of GE Appliances), Hisense, LG Group, Panasonic, Well-known companies such as Spotify and Whirlpool are also supporting Matter.
However, some Chinese merchants expressed concern about this. The Matter agreement may sacrifice some products with complex and special functions, such as cameras with special functions. Users can use different gestures to make the product respond differently, “But the access agreement It may only allow the product to perform relatively basic operations, and it may not be compatible with the special functions of all products.”
According to CNBC, the first Matter devices are already on the market, but most new Matter-enabled devices won’t be available until next year.
In any case, Matter’s Apple Home has solved the compatibility problem to a certain extent. Apple’s system ecosystem can support the development of its home furnishing sector. In particular, Apple Home continues Apple’s easy operation and simple interface, which is its major advantage.
According to Cecilia Dantas, the power of Apple Home is that it can run on all Apple devices: “You can control your home with your iPad, iPhone, Mac, or even Apple Watch in your hand.”
But Apple’s low-key entry will inevitably lead to doubts in the market. As a technology giant, what kind of home product ecosystem does Apple ultimately want to build? Will its ecological chain be similar to that of Xiaomi?
At present, from the perspective of product pricing, price-for-volume does not seem to be Apple’s way to enter the Chinese market.
However, in the Chinese market where the competition in the smart home industry is extremely fierce, how to plan Apple Home, which has not yet carried out large-scale marketing in China, is a matter of great concern to the industry.
Editor in charge: Wei Zirong
media reports
Sina Technology Titanium Media Sohu
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