Does smart home tech work in a college dorm?

0:02Welcome to The VergeCast, the flagship podcast of sending your kids to college. I'm David Imel, another David, filling in for David Pierce here and there while he's away. He's actually out contributing to society while I remain a childless cat man. Today on the show, we're talking to The Verge's senior smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, about something a lot of parents are dealing with right now, sending their kids to college. But of course, Jen being Jen, she wanted to set her son's dorm room up with the same smart home stuff that he's been using for the last 18 years. So I'm going to be asking her how that went and what her recommendations are for other parents that are sending their kids to college and might want to make it a little more intelligent than most dorm rooms are on a day-to-day basis.

0:44But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. Today, Apple surprisingly dropped a bunch of new hardware on us, including a new Mac Mini with the all-new M6 and M5 Pro chipsets and higher prices. The cheapest Mac Mini now starts at$899, up$300 from the very well-priced M4 Mac Mini was started at just$599. And if you want the M5 Pro chip, that's going to start at$1699, almost double that price. The M6 is Apple's first 2nm chipset, and Apple says it should bring improvements in performance and power efficiency, alongside a dual 16-core neural engine for AI workloads.

1:24Apple also dropped the new M5 Max and M5 Ultra chipsets in its Mac Studio, and says the M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever. The M5 Ultra starts at 96 gigabytes of RAM, and Apple's cleaning up to 4.3 times faster AI compute tasks. Alongside these upgrades, Apple also made one other pretty major announcement, a new polishing cloth. Starts at$9 instead of$19. It's pretty much the same thing, just cheaper. Android's getting a new motion assist feature, which uses moving dots on your screen to help avoid car sickness. Apple launched a similar feature in 2024, and the feature is gonna be rolling out to Android 17 devices in phases, with some Pixel phones getting the feature first.

2:03And finally, WhatsApp users on Android are now gonna see more information about callers that aren't in their contacts, like what country the number's calling from, and if you have any groups in common. You can also now add passwords for two-factor verification and multiple pass keys for both Android and iOS devices. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026.

2:25Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Your favorite fall flavors are back at Starbucks. The one and only pumpkin spice latte and the deliciously smooth iced pecan crunch latte have arrived and are ready to sip all season long. Or find a new favorite, like the new iced banana bread latte that tastes just like fall in a cup. You can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks. Support for the show comes from Injun. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Injun is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours.

3:07Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10 % back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than$300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1 ,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get$500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash Vox. Jen, welcome back to The Vergecast.

3:36Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Hello, David. So nice to be here with you on your inaugural episode. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Before we get started into the smart home dorm stuff, your son's off to his first year in college right now. We heard you on The Vergecast a few days ago talking about Alexa and Gemini and asking for advice on how to handle that. So how has that been going for you? Well, I don't generally take the advice of the AI. That was more just for a demo. But it was, you know, it was kind of interesting what it had to say, which was the piece of advice I hear from a lot of people, which is you just got to let them fly.

4:15Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Don't check it on them. And that's been the hardest part. I have Live360. But in general, it's been a really fun experience for all of us. the whole of the Vergecast is all about babies right now, whereas I'm letting my baby fly off. So I'm at the other end of the spectrum for the rest of the staff, looking at their exciting news with fond memories. But every stage of your kid's life is so much fun. And I have to say, this one has been one of the most exciting. And for a smart home reviewer, moving into a new room, a new dorm, new space was like, I'm a kid in a candy store. Like I get to try new things, try things, you know, that I probably wouldn't have done in my own home.

5:04Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And also he'd been in his room since he was six. So we'd never really done like a complete makeover. And this was an exciting, exciting time for both of us. Yeah, I imagine there's a big difference between having a room since he was six that you were just retrofitting with things as they came out and then taking the state of the art and just completely building out a room with what we have available today. Yeah, I know. It was a really fun experiment for me, especially as I often get asked questions around like smart home devices for renters or smart home devices for smaller spaces or apartments.

5:43Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And, you know, I live in a single family home and I've not had a lot of experience in those spaces. So it was great for me to be able to try out a new space. It was kind of like a dorm room, like extreme makeover because I had like two hours and I had no idea what I was going to do or what was going to work because I hadn't even really seen the space. So it was like, you know, I was like one of the one of the property brother twins, you know, just given a box of things in a room and go like, go. Yeah. Yeah. Was your son mostly on board with you kitting out his dorm room? He was. He was excited.

6:18Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:He has never been a huge, like, I must have this smart tech. But I think that's also because it's just been around him his entire life. And he, you know, it's sort of just part of things, a light switch that doesn't, that he doesn't need to use a switch. He just uses his voice is just the way it's always been. I've made this joke before on the Vergecast, but this actually happened again, which made me laugh. So the very first time he went away from home, he went to Clemson, which is where he's at college now, for a tennis camp. And he was, I think, 14 or 15. And so we took him to a dorm. They were staying in dorms for the week.

6:57Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And they handed him a key. And I walked down to the dorm with his stuff. And he went to, like, looked at the key and looked at the door and looked at me. How do we use this archaic technology? I've never used one of these before. To be fair, even in 2013, when I was in college, they had key cards for our dorm room. Okay. So, yeah, he wasn't completely unusual. And his new dorm room does have a key, and he went to use the key. And he knew how to use the key, to be clear. It just wasn't working. Okay. But, yeah, they use their phones. Their student pass and their door key, everything is on their phone.

7:39Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:So, yeah, he just used his phone to – it has like the reader. It's like a reader you would use to get into your office, that kind of thing. So yeah, it started off smart. So he was happy to continue, but we were kind of limited. And like I said, I didn't know what we're going to be able to do. So I just kind of like piled a whole bunch of gear that I was thinking this might work. And then, like I said, I had my sort of stopwatch and let's go. Were his roommates kind of down for you to kit it all out? Yes, they were. So his roommate is his best friend since second grade. So his roommate, totally used to all of this stuff.

8:18Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:The main thing that was the most important thing for both of them, and I think really the most interesting part for any kind of dorm room was lighting, was the smart lighting. because, I mean, the dorm rooms, this may be different in colleges across the country, but I'm guessing not. Two fluorescent lights. Spotty fluorescent lights from the ceilings. Yep, yep. Nothing that you want to be working in, for sure. No, just miserable. Like, I think we have some before and after pictures, but you can see, like, what it would look like before, all brightly lit. I mean, it's definitely, like, keep you awake, but also not, I mean, there's so much about lighting that does affect your mood.

8:59Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:and have been able to change that mood from like bright and light in the morning when you're getting ready to sort of a good light for studying to sort of wind down mode, that circadian rhythm. That, you know, that is all really important, especially when you're doing, you're making such a big change in your life, going from living at home, going to high school to being independent, living on your own in college. knowledge to have something that just kind of helps you feel better, I think, was really. I mean, I don't think he viewed it that way. I think he viewed it more like RGB lighting. Cool.

9:33Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:But for me, I was like, this just feels like a nice place to be. And they only have one window and it's like in the corner of the room. So there was really no natural lighting. Just like my apartment. It's just like me. Just like me. Yeah, we should note that when smart home stuff was first coming onto the market, the number one thing was always the smart lighting. And it seems that that is still people's biggest desire when it comes to smart home equipment. Now, my question here is a lot of the Wi-Fi networks at colleges have weird like captive portals and things like that. Did you experience any sort of strange setup issues that you wouldn't have at an actual regular home?

10:12You know?

10:13Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Well, so I haven't completely finished. I would say this out front because like I said I got there with no idea what I was going to face I knew they had wi-fi but I didn't know whether I would be able to connect any of the devices and I wasn't able to do any wi-fi connection while I was there however we've since discovered and I think I think it wasn't up and running yet was one of the reasons that the university has three separate wifi networks. They have one for you to connect your computers to. Um, and then they have one for you to connect like guest network. And then they have one specifically for media devices.

10:57Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Um, and that's so like, if you want to set up a streamer device or a smart speaker, those types of things. And that required, you had to like log the URL, not the URL, the Mac ID of all the devices you wanted with the university. And it's like, this is not something I'm going to be doing in two hours. And I kind of knew that that was going to be the case. It was going to, Wi-Fi was going to be an issue. So I kind of went into this with, I don't want to have to rely on Wi-Fi. I want to set this room up so that it can be completely controlled without using Wi-Fi, which was a challenge. And I was excited to try that out and see if I could surmount that challenge.

11:38Because also in the smart home, in my smart home, even though you don't need the internet for a lot of locally controlled devices, you do need a LAN.

11:46Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:You do need a local area network, some form of Wi-Fi for the communication. And I didn't have that as an option. There were Ethernet ports in the room. And we plugged his, he has a gaming PC, we plugged it in. It was 935 gigabytes. I was like, oh, okay, you're good. So he had gigabit internet in his dorm room. Okay. Yep. I was surviving off of like one megabit. So that's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing. I have to ask, David, before we dive in more onto my son's dorm, what was your dorm like? Because I think dorms have changed quite a lot. You know, it's funny. I went to school in Santa Cruz, which is right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

12:26And we still had terrible. It was not built up. I'm sure Stanford or something would have been nice. But we had one Wi-Fi network that didn't work half the time. and you really had to go to the computer lab to get anything done. But, you know, I was also very, didn't have a lot of money, so I was working off an old Dell display. But yeah, yeah, definitely not smart. Smart home stuff was brand new at the time. So, and if that really. So what else besides the lighting did you guys want to install in this dorm?

12:57Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:There were a few things that we kind of earmarked beforehand that I wanted. I wanted him to have a smart speaker. eventually I want I'm hoping we'll be able to get that connected but I also want it to be as alarm clock um so I went with what is probably my favorite smart alarm clock option which is the Amazon Echo Spot um because it doesn't have a big screen which can be distracting and also if it's an Echo device we'll show you an ad um if it has a big screen um and then it has but it does have the time and you can you know you can have some manual control of it to turn on and off and set things.

13:34Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:So that was one thing I wanted him to have. And once we do get the Wi-Fi, if we do the Wi-Fi step, he'll be able to use voice control. And it's also all of the Echo devices are Matter controllers. So that's my next stage if I get to spend another two hours is I want to use local Matter devices in the home. And most everything I did set up can now connect to Matter in the future when we get the local area network going. The other thing I had heard from other moms was that the air quality in the dorms was pretty bad. That's true. That's generally true. Yeah. Yeah. So an air purifier was an important one.

14:16Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And the boys actually wanted that too. So that wasn't sort of something we had to convince them. I gave them a couple options of ones I wanted them to try and they went with the kind of cool black one, which is a We Love air purifier. It's a really good air purifier and it's also matter compatible but it has controls on it. So this was another key thing for me. I wanted everything that I put in the room to be able to be controlled either over Bluetooth using the phone or have actual physical devices because I didn't want his roommate to have to download apps to be able to turn things on and off.

14:49To press some buttons, turn things on and off for sure.

14:52Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Yeah. And the We Love has really nice clear controls on the top. And there's like a sleep mode you can just hit at night that turns the lights off. It also has cool, fun RGB lighting on it, which is something they both really wanted. Benefits you in college. Yeah. And for the listeners, the benefit of matter for sure is that it's all local, correct? Like that's, that kind of gets around the college Wi-Fi issue a little bit. So that had been my thought, but because I couldn't even get on at all to any, So one thing, what I was thinking about doing, and then we will go back. Like I said, I'm going to try and do the whole Mac ID route.

15:33Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:But is there, I do have an Ethernet port. So I was thinking I could just get like a small, inexpensive router and just set up. Set up your own network. Is that allowed at a lot of these colleges or did they not allow it? I wasn't sure. Yeah, I haven't, I hadn't dug into the TOS of the college internet yet and probably not. And as I said, from the get-go, because there was a lot of unknowns, variables, and to your point, you know, yeah, this college, he's actually, we didn't mention, but he's at Clemson University in South Carolina, has excellent Wi-Fi and Ethernet, but a lot don't. And you may not want the load of some of these devices on whatever system you're using, especially if, you know, you are using Wi-Fi for your work.

16:16Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:That's the priority in college, right? The work. Yeah. Not the hours of gaming late into the night, avoiding your homework. No. I know. So, yeah, again, being able to control things locally. But, yes, MATA is a local area, can be used entirely locally without an internet connection for certain devices. It's up to the individual device manufacturer how they set up their device. But that is sort of built into it that you should be able to control it locally on a local LAN. So there's also Thread, which would be the option instead of Wi-Fi. But for that, you need a Thread border router, which also needs to connect to the internet.

16:58Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:Although there are some Thread devices that can just talk to each other. But the kind of devices we were setting up in the smart home, in his smart dorm, didn't really fit in that mold. He didn't need a lot of the kind of like sensors, door locks, that kind of stuff. And also Thread lighting. I did think about thread lighting, but there just weren't a lot of options yet. And I really wanted to have that Bluetooth control. And we didn't mention this, but there were only two brands I could find that I knew I could reliably set up and be able to control with an app to turn on and off and change the color and change the tone.

17:38Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:So to get that sort of, you know, that nice ambience. Most smart lighting does need Wi-Fi. Even if it has Bluetooth, you still need Wi-Fi for any kind of control, even just directly through the app while you're in the room. The two brands that you can control locally over Bluetooth are Philips Hue, which was a little pricey for this setup. And also they do have some newer, less expensive ones. But what he really wanted was the really fun colors and the kind of effects, really fun RGB type effects. So we went with Govi, which is the other brand that also has complete local Bluetooth control. So he can just open the app.

18:21Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:He's got three. We've got three devices set up right now. We have a floor lamp, a table lamp, and a light strip under his bed. So his bed's lofted. So the light strip's under his bed and his desk is under his bed. So it kind of gives him like that soft light, but over his workspace. because the other big challenge is you can't stick things on walls in dorms. Right. They probably have very specific rules around that. Very much so. So how did you get that around? Did you just have to only use lamps and stuff that were standing on their own? So lamps were the big key there. As long as you've got some outlets, big pro tip, take as many extension cords with you as you can because there's so much you need to plug in.

19:05Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And I think I ended up leaving him with five separate extension cords. Wow. Yeah, so we did lamps. And then we also, he has like a salt lamp, which has color in it too. So yeah, lamps were the best solution. And then the only place we could put the light strips were under his lofted bed. But that worked well because then that's over his desk. And his desk now has light. Because that's the other downside of being under a lofted bed is you don't have any light, even from the overhead light. Right. So, yeah, once we had the Bluetooth set up, so now he can just open the app and hit one button off and all three lights will turn off and one button on and they'll all turn on.

19:42Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:And then he can change the colors and you can also sync Govi devices to music. So he can do that with his phone. He can have his, you know, one of the lights sort of flash while he's studying. Right. Considering he has a roommate, does the roommate have access to all these things, too, through his apps? Yeah. So I told him to, I said, you can have him download the app if he wants, but he can also just, so they all have physical controllers. So you can just turn it off. And will that sync to like all the devices though, or just one at a time? No, because they're not networked, which they, you know, I said that would be my next step is to network them.

20:22Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:No, you'd have to turn them off individually. You know, it's a hardship, but it's kind of like just using a light switch. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Your business idea deserves a chance to become a reality. Shopify gives you the tools you need to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. That's important because when your first customer walks through your digital door or your actual door, you want it to be as easy as possible for them to actually buy something. The hard part should be coming up with a great idea, not handling the transactions.

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