Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“Sort of definitionally, everyone's house is an edge case. So you cannot sell in a box something that works for everyone… I don't think any of this is ready for primetime because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else. Like you just end up being the systems administrator for your house.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Ahead of Apple's expected smart-home device, made partly with LG, Patel was arguing that you can't sell a smart home in a box. A self-described "huge smart home nerd," he gave the example of his basement door, which gets no Wi-Fi without adding another mesh node.
Transcript
…it needs to work with the big ecosystem of matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for matter too and HomeKit in general. But the point that I have just been making for ages that Jen has been making for ages is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box.
Right.
…the money to do that. Like you just end up with, oh, this is getting complicated really fast. And I don't, I'm very curious to see how Apple repositions HomeKit in this device and a bunch of second-party accessories from LG as an actual product solution, not just some fun stuff you can nerd out with. And just to say it again, I love this stuff and I love nerding out on it. And I'm a sicko, and I don't think any of this is ready for primetime because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else. Like you just end up being the systems administrator for your house.
Or you're Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing. And unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like the more I use Siri AI, the less impressed I am by Siri AI. It is, I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate…
can search your text messages and email like never before.
It sure can. And it actually does that passably well. That is not bleeding edge AI technology, but it does work. All of this other stuff, the like just make sense of the world around me stuff, actually is bleeding edge AI technology. And I don't see any of it in Siri right
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