Memorial Day tech deals are here, but the smart home stuff is what caught my eye

Look, I'm not going to pretend I have some crystal ball here. The honest answer is: it depends on what you already have and what you're trying to accomplish.

If you're starting from scratch, these sales are genuinely a reasonable entry point. The ecosystem lock-in that worried me three years ago has loosened up a bit with Matter (the interoperability standard that was supposed to fix everything, and sort of did, kind of). You can mix and match brands now without everything falling apart, which wasn't true when I first started paying attention to this space.

If you're like me and already have a bunch of devices, the calculus is different. Do you need another smart speaker? Probably not. But that robot vacuum you've been eyeing? Or the video doorbell that actually works with your existing setup? Those might be worth grabbing while the prices are down.

The smartphone deals are a separate conversation entirely. The upgrade cycle has slowed way down because, honestly, phones got good enough that most people don't need the newest thing every year. But if you're still carrying around something from 2022 or earlier, the current generation is a meaningful jump. Battery life alone makes it worth considering.

What am I actually buying?

I'm expanding my smart home setup this weekend, specifically in the home automation direction. I've resisted the full smart lighting thing for years because, I don't know, flipping a switch works fine and I grew up in a house where you turned lights off manually like a normal person. But the energy monitoring features in some of these newer systems have gotten interesting enough that I'm reconsidering.

The robot vacuum situation is also tempting me. I have an older model that does an okay job but the navigation on these newer ones is dramatically better. They use actual spatial mapping now instead of just bouncing around randomly. It's the kind of incremental improvement that adds up over time, the same pattern I watched play out with laptops in the 2000s where each generation was just a little bit smarter until suddenly they were actually useful.

What I'm not buying: anything with a subscription requirement baked in. This is a hill I will die on! Too many smart home companies have figured out that recurring revenue looks great on investor calls, so they're locking basic features behind monthly fees. Check the fine print before you buy anything.

The bigger picture here

I've been covering tech long enough to recognize when a category is maturing, and smart home is definitely in that phase now. The wild promises have calmed down, the actual products work reasonably well, and the prices have come down to where normal people can participate without feeling like early adopter guinea pigs.

That said, we still don't know how durable these ecosystems are going to be. What happens when Google decides to kill another product line? (And they will, because they always do.) What happens when your smart thermostat company gets acquired and the new owners decide to change the terms of service? These are real questions that don't have good answers yet.

For now, I'm treating smart home purchases the way I treat any tech purchase: buy what solves an actual problem you have today, don't buy based on promises about future features, and assume that anything connected to the internet will eventually become a security liability or get discontinued. Cheerful, I know!

The Memorial Day sales are real, the discounts are meaningful, and if you've been waiting for a good time to jump in or expand what you have, this weekend is as good as any. Just don't buy stuff you don't need because it's on sale. That's how you end up with a drawer full of smart plugs you never set up.

If you want to argue about any of this, my email's on the about page. I actually read those, unlike the kids who apparently live entirely on social media now.

Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 hours ago · 3 min