Sonos' headphones are extremely Sonos

25:52They added a button. That's really what it comes down to. Yes. So the first Roam had a combined power and Bluetooth pairing button, and you had to set it up at home first before you could use it as a portable speaker, which never made any sense. So they fixed that. You can use it out of the box now. Whoop-dee-doo. But yeah, there's a new button. It sounds the exact same. So if you've heard it before, you've heard this one. Battery life is the same. Some people haven't had the best time with the Roam over time because the battery ages not so well. So it last longer. But yeah, it's the same speaker as before.

26:24Same price. Just a new button. Comes in colors. It's small. It's a good bathroom speaker. That's how I use mine for the shower. But yeah, it's not my top tier favorite Soundos gadget. Fair. But I mean, buttons are good. We here on the Verge Cast, we believe in buttons. You know this. So I will take it. Love buttons. Yes. All right. Well, it's very upsetting that I want to buy one of these now, and I will not forgive you for that. I also want to buy an Ace now. I don't have a soundbar. And all of a sudden, And I'm like, oh,$1 ,200 is a perfectly rational amount of money to spend upgrading my TV audio today.

26:55Like, what could possibly go wrong? There's the ARC and there's an ARC 2 coming and even like a higher end soundbar they're working on. Don't tell me this, Chris. So much down the pipeline. This is not helpful. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to be right back to talk about MoviePass. Chris, thank you as always. My pleasure. Thanks, y 'all.

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30:51Welcome back. In the top drawer of my desk here, I have this pile of cards. Does everybody have a pile of cards somewhere? I sort of assume everybody has a pile of cards somewhere. Mine is just a bunch of random junk, mostly. It's gift cards with like 19 cents still on them, a bunch of expired credit cards that I don't know what to do with. This one, I think, is a Chick-fil-A rewards card that somehow I have. I don't know. And in that pile the other day, I found this red MasterCard that says MoviePass in big letters up in the top left corner. It ends in 7099, just in case you're curious. I got this card, I think, in 2017, maybe 2018.

31:34It apparently expires January of 2025, but I'm confident that I'm never going to get to use it again. In fact, I've never used it once. I never even managed to get this card activated because by the time I signed up for MoviePass, the company was such a mess that it never even responded to my customer service emails. I looked back through and all I have is a bunch of one-sided requests being like, Hi, I would just like to use the card that I'm paying you for, please. Nothing. If you were online in the summer of 2017, you probably remember MoviePass. There's a decent chance you were a user of MoviePass, that you got a card and then went and saw a million movies all at once.

32:12It was an all-you-can-watch movie theater subscription. Ten bucks a month to see up to one movie a day. That was it. Those were all the rules, at least for a while. It was a great product for anyone who likes watching movies. and it was a truly horrific business. It took less than two years for the company to burn through$250 million and shut down the product entirely, which is honestly, in a certain way, kind of impressive. Anyway, there's a new documentary out now on Macs called MoviePass Movie Crash, and it tells the story of MoviePass. It was the greatest thing ever. MoviePass. MoviePass. MoviePass.

32:50The popular movie ticket app. MoviePass. We remember them. Whatever happened to those guys? It's a story about wild corporate greed, about a lot of bad decisions. And I think at its core, it's about how two black founders found themselves ousted from their own company and really their own story by a couple of fast-talking, wheeling and dealing white dudes. I was like, we need to pump the brakes a little bit. I just thought that it would be better if he wasn't a part of the team. It's like the heart of MoviePass. The deeper you got in, the more you realize all of this was part of a bigger story.

33:30The doc is fascinating. I really recommend everyone watch it, whether or not you still have your red MoviePass card lying around. A couple of days after I watched the doc, I got on a call with two people to talk about it. Stacey Spikes, co-founder and CEO of MoviePass. My name is Muta Ali and I'm a film director. I should point out, by the way, that Muta Ali is the director of this film also, so just in case that wasn't clear. This is sort of a spoiler, I guess, but the bones of the early MoviePass story is this. Stacey and his co-founder, Hamei Watt, started MoviePass in 2011, and it's more expensive than it turned out to be.

34:05It's doing okay. They have about 20 ,000 subscribers, not taking over the world, but coming along. They hire this guy, Mitch Lowe, who says he was a co-founder of Netflix, but that turns out to not really be the case for interesting reasons, who then links MoviePass up with a company called Helios and Matheson, and its CEO, Ted Farnsworth, who injects a bunch of marketing money into MoviePass in order to help it grow. And along the way, Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth start testing ideas to see how they might help the thing grow into the stratosphere. We had grown to 20 ,000 subs. And if you go and you look at the Netflix growth curve, it has this long, slow arc.

34:45And then there's this hockey puck. It just starts to take off. And we had a very similar trajectory in that we were a multimillion-dollar revenue company. We weren't that far from profitability. We were at a$30 price point. We knew we were in the ballpark, but we got there with no advertising. It was only word of mouth. And so we had never had an ad budget. And so really it was we had figured out what our customer acquisition cost was. we wanted to do the deal just to get ad budget, but still grow with the right per month subscription price. And so that's what you wanted to do. You needed to leave the garage and you had a really hardcore fan base that people that just loved the service and it was break even.

35:35And so now, great, add that. Well, it broke apart when HMNY, they were coming in and they secretly ran a test and Mitch had given them access to our login page. And they went online and they put the new price point up and tested it. We thought our site had been hacked. And we were like, hey, our site's been hacked. Somebody just put up a landing page for 10 bucks. And they were like, no, no, no. Mitch gave Ted and his team access to the website landing page. And no one ever told us or the engineering team. And so when you clicked on the button, it didn't let you sign up. They were just using it to gauge interest.

36:19And they were like, we've got a hit. And I said, well, if you want to make it even bigger, make it five bucks a month. If you want to make it bigger than that, make it$1 a month. I said, make it 99 cents. Yeah. Giving money away is pretty easy. I kept thinking that watching this, that like, oh, if you just give people money, they'll take it and you'll be very successful at giving people money. And it's a race to the bottom when you have no competitors. But why? Why don't you walk your way down in price? Ten bucks a month for all the movies you can watch was just never going to work. To be clear, it was awesome for moviegoers.

36:53And one of my favorite things about the doc is all the folks in it who saw hundreds of movies for a fraction of the price. I love that for moviegoers. But it was never sustainable. Lowe and Farnsworth had this big idea about collecting data about those moviegoers and then selling it back to theater chains. And eventually, they seemed to think MoviePass would get so big and so powerful that they'd be able to negotiate a piece of ticket sales and even concessions from those theater chains. That didn't happen. Even at the time, we all kind of knew it wasn't going to happen. And just in case you think that's 2020 hindsight, here is a clip from a Verge video in July of 2018.

37:31I mean, look, the whole thing really is a mess, and it comes down to the fact that MoviePass doesn't make money. The company hopes that when it hits a certain subscriber base size, all the math will magically work out. But in the meantime, it's burning through cash, causing the stock price of its parent company to plummet. The fix apparently seems to be to get its customers to just stop going to movies, or if they do, to pay up. That last point is a good one, by the way. At one point, to stop the money bleeding, MoviePass started to create weird new rules for what you can see and when. And its executives are actually under investigation for even doing worse things, like allegedly breaking the product on purpose so that people would stop using it at big movies.

38:09The whole thing was just a mess. And a big part of the MoviePass movie crash story is Stacey saying that aloud internally and getting pushed out of the door for it. You had the founder who built the plane saying it can't handle these G-forces. There's no way the math is going to work. What made it worse to me is you had customers saying, I am willing to pay more to help you be solvent. Like when your customer base is saying that, that's crazy, right? If people are like, this is so awesome. I went to 400 movies last year. Please charge me more because I know I'm saving a lot of money. I'm still, I've got so much upside.

38:52I'll pay you a hundred bucks a month and I'm still saving money. And when your customer base is saying that and your founder is saying that, then the writing's on the wall. And that's part of the plan. You figure it out. You experiment and you find the right place. Great. You found an entry point that consumers love it. Now find a profitable place to be at. And if that's 30 bucks a month, yeah, you might lose a third of these people, but you're still the biggest subscription company in the world for theatrical. So that was the hard part was just adjust your pricing. It's like, what's wrong with that?

39:31You're fired. Get out. Part of the reason I've always been interested in the MoviePass story is that the rough shape of that arc is something we've seen so many times in tech. You prioritize growth at all costs. You lose a giant amount of money. And then something, something you'll become so big and so powerful that you can either raise prices or find new ways to make money. That's the Uber story. That's the Lyft story. That's the Bird story. That's the Instacart story. That's the TikTok story. On and on and on. Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn't. It definitely didn't for MoviePass. And in fact, I think MoviePass might have sort of speedrun that whole story quicker than just about anybody.

40:13The other kind of tech trope about MoviePass that kept jumping out to me was the whole fast-talking founder with big ideas who might be full of crap but everybody keeps listening to anyway thing. which is obviously a staple of Silicon Valley. And for Muta Ali, poking at that idea, and in this case, who played that part for MoviePass, was a big part of the MoviePass documentary. When I was doing research, a lot of people in social media who were trying to discover what's the real story behind MoviePass, some of them were speaking with the understanding that Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth were really the founders.

40:50They were speaking and having these deep dives into MoviePass and not even mentioning Stacey. And I felt that they might need to enter the story through their perspective. It serves us in a couple ways because it's a little bit of a reveal for people who don't know. It might make some people uncomfortable who do know and maybe, oh, do these filmmakers even know who the real founders of MoviePass are? And they question that and hopefully keep watching and not assume the work. But it also plays into part of the premise, which kind of revealed itself in a more crystallized form once we were later on in production, which is it has to do with racial bias and people's assumptions about who plays what role, especially in a tech company.

41:32And maybe if you did enter this story, assuming that, okay, yeah, uh, yeah, Mitch is the leader and Stacy's just kind of complaining. And maybe he doesn't know how to ride this rocket ship like Mitch does, you know, because Mitch is the founder of Netflix. And all of a sudden your biases played against you. And then you're like, oh, maybe I need to rethink how I was thinking about this. And so that little pivot in terms of the plot structure or that little inverse order helps play into that. I will say that it was a battle internally. You know, I didn't, this is a collaborative thing. And so I, at first, didn't want to start the story that way.

42:08But then there's an actual arguable point someone can make that we need to start with the excitement. We need to start with the millions of people coming into MoviePass. and in my mind part of me is like well you can't look over Stacey and I'm amazing like all these 10 years of development they did before that and so it was a lot of back and forth and and I actually needed to see it done both ways before I actually was on board with this little trick because I think it was Archie Gibbs who suggested it to me that oh maybe we should trick people at the very beginning and I was like I don't know exactly what that would do to me in terms of how I feel about this story.

42:48And I didn't like it until I decided to like roll it out the way that we did, you know, and like roll it out so that it really emphasizes that Stacey and Jamei were in a position of vulnerability, a position where they weren't in control of the ship. And okay, that's normal. They're not the founders. And then you realize, oh, they are the founders and they're not in position to drive this thing. And then you might feel a little bit more concerned about them. and so it was a lot involved it was a lot involved and i'm glad we ended up doing it the way because it's kind of fun it really does work it's it's quite a it's quite a twist whatever 17 and a half minutes into the movie yeah stacy how did that part of the process i don't know how involved you were kind of with the the overall production but like watching a lot of this sort of twists and turns of it play out again all these years later obviously it hasn't gone away you've you've been involved this is the thing you lived through but how does it feel to see all of it sort of put into one place in order?

43:42I mean, I think it was what Mutali did. So I've seen, you know, WeWork and Theranos and all of them. I think we all kind of travel in a pack and we watch these things. And I think what he did was closer to the Steve Jobs Apple story, because it's the only thing you know, they had a lot more airtime on CNBC or MSNBC or all of the different shows that they were on Yahoo Who Finance, where they were being presented as that and called themselves the founders. So whoever thought of it or whichever way, it is a masterstroke in storytelling because it's not straight linear. And a third of the way through, it then brings you back to the beginning, to the origin story.

44:29I thought it was a masterstroke. He did make me nervous the first 15 minutes. He was sitting next to me in the theater when I was seeing it the first time. And he got a couple of side eye glances. And he literally said, just wait for it. Wait for it. Because I didn't know what was happening. And he literally had to tell me, hang on. Because I wanted to pause the film and go have a conversation. In the first cut, he should have just cut you out entirely. Just as a bit. Just to really make you sweat for a while. Yeah. My wife was there with me. And she goes, did they know you were the founder? And I go, yes.

45:07I said, yes. Hang on. He waited until the end. We were at almost, I think, picture lock by the time Stacey saw it, so it wasn't like he had a big chance to change much. So it was do or die at that point. One thing I've always wondered about MoviePass is, could it have worked? If they hadn't grown too fast, burned money at unprecedented rates, made a series of ridiculous bad decisions, is there a stable idea underneath here? Both Muta Ali and Stacey agreed that the$10 a month thing killed MoviePass. But both seemed to think that it didn't necessarily have to. I think there were a series of failures that took place that allowed MoviePass to crash in the way that it did.

45:49The biggest, though, I think is having$9.95 as that price point for promotional purposes turning into this is our price point forever. and I wonder, Stacy, you know, I think what you said was 48 hours when you had the price at$9.95 and then you gained 175 ,000 new subscribers in two days. If you had cut it off then, maybe that would have been the secret to success because you would have gotten that marketing boosted or what do you think? Yeah, I think, and we talked about it, we said, great, turn that off, tell everyone this is a promotional price point and just give them a heads up. This is a promotional price point.

46:28You're all month to month. At some point, this will normalize, but enjoy it for now. And then I would take certain segments and I would have said, these people are going up to 30, like test different zones and different things, test your different price points, see what elasticity you have. If we go up to$50, how high is the churn? If we're at$30 or if we're at 25, but what's the lowest we can go based on the behavior we're seeing? And then you move your price and you're going to get some churn, but you've got so many people excited off the original idea that they keep going. And that's all you had to do.

47:07And we would be sitting here talking about a really big company, a big global company that was way, because an AMC or a Regal would never have been able to catch up to you. To be fair, of course, Stacey believes all of that. He's actually the CEO of MoviePass again. After being ousted from the company in 2018, it went through all of its disasters. He bought the company back in 2021 and actually relaunched it last year. There were a bunch of new things about it, some Web3 stuff that I thought was kind of weird at the time, but doesn't really seem to have come to anything. But it operates very differently.

47:44From a technology standpoint, we had some of the innovation. So we had our first year back and we were profitable. And we added a credit system where we knew we needed a governor to be between the consumer, the product, and the marketplace. And in any marketplace, you need to show value to the consumer so that the consumer can have alignment with the company. In version one, whether you went to, say, an AMC where there maybe wasn't a partnership or you went to a B &B where there was, in the app, you couldn't see the difference. And though we were getting wholesale pricing from someone else, there was no display of that.

48:30So this version, we simply said, let's use a credit system to show alignment when the price is cheaper and say, let's motivate them by giving them a certain number of credits so that now they are aligned with saving money the way we're aligned with saving money. That didn't exist in V1, but we knew that was the pathway because we were beginning to test that in 2016. And so when I said, guys, let me tell you how to get there, A, raise the price, B, we have this variable pricing capability. They're like, no, this$10 price point is so awesome. We're adding a quarter of a million. I'm like, you're losing$30 per person per month.

49:12So I think that the technology, it's subscription. This isn't new. Since newspapers were born, we've had subscription businesses. So a lot of it's not new, but the way to use the tech is new. So now we built it with machine learning and AI engines, which is very different. So I think the technology was there. It's just stupid was driving the bus. And that's all that happened. The problem with that theory, though, is that the movie theater industry looks really different now than it did in 2018 or 2011, for that matter, when they first started working on this. We're in the midst of one of the worst box office runs in a long time.

49:53We just had the worst Memorial Day at the movie theater in three decades. And by at least one measure that I saw, ticket sales are 22 % below where they were at this point a year ago, and a full 41 % down from 2019. It's kind of like the pandemic happened and movie theaters just never came back. Which makes sense, right? We're streaming more, we're on Netflix more, we're home more. Maybe movie theaters are just over. This is not remotely surprising to anyone who is like living life and watching TV more often, but Stacey doesn't think it's the case. This guy loves the movies. I am not a filmmaker, but I love and respect what people like Muhtali will spend three, four, five, six, seven years on bringing a 90 minute story to screens and telling this.

50:45They are our prophets. They are our freedom fighters. They bring stories that otherwise would never get seen. It's such an important art form that is under attack that if you know you have the burden of responsibility, that you have technologies that can double the attendance of moviegoing, and you can create efficiencies in a sector that doesn't work with itself. When you see a Netflix, they can go into a space, dominate that space from top to bottom because they have the direct-to-consumer relationship. And no one ever built anything from the consumer point of view and empowering the consumer.

51:29So I think it's a beautiful moment in time because I don't want that cinema died on my watch, you know, that it was a simple technology upgrade. I want the Mutalis of the world to forever be able to tell stories in such a powerful medium. And theaters shouldn't be these things on their last legs. It's just stupidity and arrogance and pride that's preventing technology from unlocking such great opportunities. We're in such a beautiful moment that if we can get out of the way, I think that storytelling will go to the next level. because I think we're on the verge of a new golden age of cinema from we see how storytelling creation is just mind-blowingly changing.

52:18And you see how even the sight and sound experience in the theater is changing. But what it takes to get people there isn't changing. And that's the part that we're focused on, and I feel blessed to be able to have the privilege to be able to do that. Yeah. Basically, other than Dune, it's been a disaster at theaters this year. And I'm curious from both of your perspectives, like, what do we do next with movie theaters? I agree it could be easier. I agree buying it should it could be cheaper, all this stuff. But I do wonder, does something fundamental in the movie going experience need to change here?

52:50The cinema has a PR problem. It doesn't have an attendance problem. You notice that this past weekend, okay, more people went in four days to the movies than everyone who will attend an NFL game in an entire year. In four days, that's how many people went to the movies, okay? You don't get at a football game, they don't tell you how many tickets are sold at every single game. I think that we need to stop reporting box office numbers because we're focused on the wrong things. We're not focused on movie making. We're focused on movie going. And it doesn't matter how great the movie was because most really big films didn't gross at the box office.

53:38Over time, they became part of our culture. And so we're focused on the wrong thing because everything is determined by one number. What was the gross of the box office this weekend compared to last year or the year before? We need to stop reporting those numbers and get back to the days when I was a kid. You didn't report grosses of Star Wars. It wasn't until IMDB and certain other things came online that my mom would call up and go, oh, you know what's such and such gross this weekend? We became obsessed with that. And you'll hear even with YouTube and a lot of creators, they say, I stopped watching my view number.

54:19I started focusing on content and I started focusing on doing the right content and it will take care of itself. Moviegoing is healthy when you stop comparing it to these numbers that every Monday morning you have a report card that you failed. No sports do this. No other industry. The travel industry, they report quarterly where some single companies, but you do not get group-wide grosses every weekend on a business. You don't have it. So I think that's detrimental to us. It gives us a very big PR problem. Definitely. That's a good take. I have not heard that before. I actually really agree with that.

54:59Muzali, what do you think? Are movie theaters, you're making stuff for the internet. Who cares about movie theaters, right? No, I care about movie theaters. The most fun I've had out this year has been at movie theaters, but it was screening movie pass, movie crash. So I think that's probably why. But that in-person experience is something that will always be better than watching it at home. And speaking of Dune, I just watched Dune 2 for the first time with my brother. and we watched it on a TV. And I wish that we had watched it in a theater. Maybe the second time I felt that way, like, oh, this movie was so great.

55:34I wish that I'd seen it in a theater, out with other people, that sort of glow that happens when you go. And that communal experience that Stacey was referring to is something special that culturally, I think we're going to turn back toward after we get enough of sort of the convenience of watching movies on our phone. and I think movie going is still going to thrive and I think maybe it's just time for us to be reminded of how special it is. I like it. I will say Dune 2 ripped in theaters. Like it's one of the, maybe the best theater going experience, not to make you feel bad, one of the best movie theater experiences I've had in a very long time.

56:13The movie is just so loud. It's still playing some places. See it in Dolby Atmos because the sound design in there is just insane. I haven't seen anybody's house that can do Dolby Atmos. He's right about that, I think. And I agree that there is still something to be said for going to the movies. I certainly felt it with Dune 2, still thinking about that movie. And I think there's a lot more to change about the moviegoing experience than just the way we buy tickets and what they cost. But the way we buy tickets and what they cost is definitely a start. All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline.

56:49We'll be right back.

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1:00:30really helpful as we think about where we go from here. This week, we have a smart home question. Hi, my name's Chris. I'm from Los Angeles. So this is a question about the smart home. So probably, hi, Jen. How are you? So I have Home Assistant running on a little Raspberry Pi, and I love it. It's actually pretty good. It's pretty flexible. I have like two stupid things I need to do that Apple Home doesn't let me do. And it's great. I have speakers and lights. Is there a reason to add like a third thing? I like kind of can't come up with like I rent. And so like, I'm not going to get all new blinds, right?

1:01:05Like I don't have a gate in front of my house. I don't want to do a smart lock. I don't think unless there's one that's safe. I feel like the smart homes kind of just like in a really bad spot generally, but like in a like non-starter kind of spot for renters. Am I wrong in that? Let me know. Cause I would love to be proven wrong in that. Like, please. I would desperately love that, but I don't know. You let me know. Thanks. Bye. All right. Well, ask and you shall receive. Jen Toohey, how are you? I'm good, thanks. Hi, Chris, too. Very excited to answer this question because it's a topic I get asked a lot.

1:01:35So yeah, lots to dive into in your question there. The first one I'm going to say, renters, yes, there is lots of great stuff you can do, especially if you have home assistant. I mean, Chris, you're already set up pretty well for doing some cool stuff. I'd actually say there's sort of two answers here. Like if you're a renter, there are options. If you're a renter with Home Assistant, there are way more options. Oh, interesting. Okay. Just because, you know, it sounds like Chris is maybe, you know, quite technically advanced. I mean, if you have Home Assistant, I think we're safe to assume. On a Raspberry Pi.

1:02:08Yeah, you're doing well. You know what you're doing. And then also he mentioned Apple Home. So I'm assuming that's his main platform. That does narrow your choices down, but then Home Assistant widens them back up again. But just to answer the overall question about renters, I do think there are more and more options for renters. And you mentioned door locks. Door locks actually are in a better space for renters than they have been for a long time. There's the August Wi-Fi smart lock, which has been sort of our number one choice for renters because it's retrofit. So you're not having to replace your door lock, which your landlord may not like, but you still get to control the lock in a way that is useful for a smart home perspective.

1:02:47That's the one that just goes like on over top of the existing lock, right? Right, of the back of your deadbolt. You do have to remove the thumb term, but everything else stays as is. That is pretty clever. Which makes it very easy. Also means you can take it with you if you move to another apartment. And also, Yale has just come out with a new retrofit smart lock. So there's another good option there. And they both, both Yale and August, who are owned by the same company and their sister brands, they have come out with a new keypad that has a touch fingerprint reader in it. So you can now use a fingerprint to unlock your August Wi-Fi smart lock.

1:03:23That is the thing about the smart home that feels the most sci-fi-y to me, by the way. The fingerprint thing, it just, it's the most like mission impossible thing that I have tried in the smart home and I cannot recommend it enough. And well, they've now got facial recognition for smart locks. So I haven't tried that yet, but that came out at CES. But yes, and the fingerprint is great. It's really easy. It's my favorite way of unlocking the door. Apple Home Key is also a really useful way if you use Apple Home. Unfortunately, there are not any retrofit door locks that work with Apple Home Key right now because it's all inside the house.

1:03:57So there's nothing to do the NFC, although these new keypads do have NFC in them. So it's potential we may see Home Key come to some of these retrofit locks. And that brings me to the second retrofit lock I would recommend, which is actually coming out this month. And when I say recommend, I haven't tested it yet, but I have tested some of their past products. and they've been good. Akara is coming out with a retrofit smart lock. So the same concept, you can just replace the thumb term on your deadbolt and then you can put a keypad out in the front of your house so that you can access it. That also has a fingerprint reader that does have NFC in.

1:04:34And I would not be surprised if at some point in future that could support HomeKey because Akara already does support HomeKey in some of its products. So there's lots of options now. They didn't used to be, so that's nice, for HomeKit, Apple Home compatible retrofit smart locks. Do you think that's a good third place to start the lock thing? I do. I think locks are actually my favorite smart home device. Most useful, easiest for everyone to use, not complicated, mostly, and provide real value. You know, being able to unlock and lock your door remotely if there's a problem. There's so much value, I think, in smart locks.

1:05:12And the safety issue, it's just as easy. I think if you're concerned about someone hacking your smart door lock, don't be. It's just as easy for someone to break a window. It's easier, much easier, sorry, to break a window than it is to hack your smart lock. And in terms of whether someone's going to knock your door down, again, regular door lock, smart lock, not a big difference. So, yeah, I would not worry about the safety side unless you have someone who's really smart, a big hacker who's after you, in which case maybe. be. But in terms of the third thing, I mean, it differs, I think, for renters, perhaps from people that own their homes, because, you know, a smart thermostat is a big one, right?

1:05:51Energy management, you know, bringing that into your smart home, I would say if a smart thermostat is the research shows that the top three devices people use in their smart homes is smart video doorbells, smart cameras, which are kind of the same, smart thermostats, and then robot vacuums. Oh, interesting. Okay. As well as smart light bulbs are in there at number four than the robot vacuums. So you've already got the smart light. I mean, a video doorbell is you can do a battery powered one as a renter. So that's a good option. Door locks actually aren't in the top categories. I think it's just still a bit of a niche.

1:06:27But I do find it, like I said, one of the most useful smart devices in my home. And you use it every day. And yeah, there's a lot of innovation in this space too. But for Chris, who has, I think, you know, that is probably a more advanced smart home user. What I would recommend as like the third thing based on what he has is more automation. So that is using sensors, making your home smart, not just having a few smart devices in it. And because he has Home Assistant, you know, using devices like motion sensors, contact sensors, smart plugs, smart buttons to kind of bring everything together and work more seamlessly.

1:07:06Going back to Acara, who I mentioned at the beginning, that's a really good option for someone that's using Apple Home and Home Assistant because you can actually, most of their Zigbee devices will pair directly to Home Assistant and they have great inexpensive motion sensors, smart buttons. So things like he can have his lights turn on when he opens his front door. Or what would be really fun for him to try actually is the FP2 presence sensor, which is an Akara device. And that, I think, works really well in apartment setting because I've struggled to get it to work in my home because I have so many people in my home.

1:07:38But it uses millimeter wave sensing, which is a really interesting development in the smart home sensing, radar sensing to use presence detection versus motion detection. So if he's sitting in his living room watching TV or your lights won't turn off because you haven't moved. Right. So and I find that that's a really interesting sort of development in the smart home. And for Chris, the FP2 does work with Home Assistant. We can include in the show notes this is a great blog that this one guy wrote exactly about how to integrate it with Home Assistant and what benefits there are. So, you know, for Chris, I think more automation, you know, making your home smarter because things like sensors, contact sensors, you can take them with you when you leave too.

1:08:18But yeah, so there's lots. And then the one, the final thing I would say that a lot of people are interested in and works for both renters and homeowners is a smart security system. There's a lot of benefit there, especially because if you can integrate with, say, your door lock and your video doorbell, if you want a video doorbell. So there's a lot the smart home has to offer for renters. And it does seem like I think the stigma that anything beyond the very basics requires opening up your walls, I think, is so much less true than it was even just a couple of years ago that a lot of the stuff you're describing used to be a lot of work.

1:08:52And now it's a lot of like battery maintenance. And that's kind of it in a lot of these cases, especially like I think about Ring has done a really good job of this, of making it basically that you can just hang a doorbell on your wall. And like, I have a lot of feelings about people in especially like apartment buildings and condo buildings who have video doorbells that just go out into the hallway. Yeah, I have a lot of like moral quandaries with that. But the idea of what it can accomplish for you, this stuff in general is a lot simpler than it gets credit for for people. I think now, especially if you've gone through the work to set up a Raspberry Pi running home assistant, like you have the chops to do most of the smart home stuff that is available to you at this point.

1:09:30For sure. Yeah. And there is there's a lot. And in terms of the doorbell, actually, I just, this actually happened last week. So this is news for you on the Vertocast. Arlo has some good battery-powered doorbells. And their first-generation one just became HomeKit compatible. Oh, cool. There was only one battery-powered doorbell that worked with Apple Home before. That was the Acara. Now the Arlo essential first-gen battery-powered doorbell will work with HomeKit. So not HomeKit secure video, but with HomeKit. So, Chris, if you were thinking about a video doorbell, those two would be a good option.

1:10:05Cameras are a whole different thing. And as you say, especially if you're recording your neighbors walk past your house every morning. But if that's something you're interested in, those are two good options. And a door lock and then motion. Get some sensors. Get your house to be really smart. And that's really fun. I think especially if you're the type who wants to sort of experiment and play, just adding sensors and smart plugs to everything you can think of opens up so many things. And for me, it's like most of the stuff that I've tried ends up being sort of useless, but just it's just fun to play with and be like, OK, whenever I get to like the fourth step to the basement, what should turn on?

1:10:40I don't even know. Let's just have some stuff happen. And it's just, yeah, just that. And the sensors are cheap and they're everywhere and they're easy to pick up and move around. And I think I think that's a good call. Just like buy some sensors, spend a Saturday playing with them and see what works for you. I like that a lot. See what happens. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Chris, I hope that helps. Jen, thank you as always. Thank you. All right, that is it for The Verge Cast today. Thank you to everyone who was on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com.

1:11:10We have Chris's Sonos reviews. We have a MoviePass, MovieCrash review. Everything you want. Plus, again, lots going on in tech. It's WWDC next week. There's a lot to see. Check out TheVerge.com. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or headphones you think we should buy instead of the Ace, email us at VergeCast at TheVerge.com. call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. I particularly want to hear what you're excited about at WWDC. We have a bunch of WWDC stuff coming. Lots of AI stuff presumed for next week. A few of us will be on the ground. Really want to know what you think is coming and whether you're excited about what we're going to see from Apple in this next year.

1:11:46So hit us up. Vergecast of theverge.com. 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about, like I said, WWDC, plus a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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