Lets talk about Homekit… baby.

It isn’t a secret to anyone here that I am a Super Nerd. From my love of Star Wars and Star Trek to Legos, to wanting to automate everything.. even my home. I get to work on solving problems (and just doing cool things). From my office (which I admit is overkill) to the other automations around the house, I will give you the good, bad an ugly.

Now, I have automation at two different homes.. We will get to the beach house eventually but today, I am going to talk about my smart home in Portland. And what it really required. So, lets talk about what I did.

First off, the Network.

Internet

When I first left my job at DAT and started my business I knew I was going to work at home mostly full time. I started off in the smallest bedroom, giving me a office about 1/2 the size of the one I had at our office in Beaverton. I started out with Comcast, but quickly realized that scaling that up to have great internet access was expensive, and frankly… slow.

The answer?? Since I live in Portland and fiber is available, the choice is pretty straight forward. At the time, there was 1GB available for a low sum of $70. It also allowed me to get away from the cable modem, which I wasn’t renting anyway (I have been a BYOL customer for a long time). So I went that way.

I am a huge fan of Ubiquiti, and at the time I wasn’t looking to add a rack to my house. So, rather than doing a Dream Machine Pro, and doing networking separately, I decided to take a step down and use the Dream Machine.

It was good enough to be able to handle around 850Mbps while having the IPS/IDS on. I might eventually replace it now, but it was the best option. When I was in the little office, I had everything plugged in locally. This was great for reliability for video calls and I also had my Synology plugged in directly. So, I had fast access to the NAS, and the internet.

Cabling - Needed when I moved from the router.

First thing first, you need to have a network in your home that is reliable. Without a good network most of the items we are talking about won’t work correctly. My home isn’t super large, but due to construction and the fact that parts are underground, it required me to add some cabling to ensure I have good wireless coverage. After the first year, I moved from the small room to a larger room in the house. It felt like having a bigger space would allow me to have a conference setup with a couch.

After moving, two things became apparent:

• Moving rooms and away from wired networking was slower. I often found myself having poor video or lags while in the office.
• My “conference room” setup was cool, but since I had to put it on a TV in the closet, there were a ton of walls between it and the router. If I thought the wireless network quality was LOW at my desk… it was HORRIBLE for the Mac Mini in the closet.

With network being so poor, I decided to bite the bullet and pay to have drops wired from the old office to the new one. I also had them wire an extra drop down to the closet of our bedroom. That will allow me to add a wireless access point downstairs to ensure we have good coverage. Our house is a an odd mid century modern, so networking is kinda strange. You add in the fact that our house is built into the hill, and it makes even more sense.

Finalizing the network.

I didn’t want to have to run a power adaptor or use a power injector for the wireless access points or the access switch. I went ahead an also added a USW Ultra 60W. The drop to my desk was easy, I just plugged it into a Flex Mini. As for the drop behind my TV, I also added a Flex Mini. This allowed me to have extra ports at both locations, as I am always messing with my setup.

You still need Mac’s to be on the wifi network to enable you to do authentication from your watch, or them to do hand off tasks for your phone. I went ahead and added a power injector behind the TV and added an access point there as well. This allowed me to wire the TV directly for network, along with the Mac Mini, Apple TV and my PS4. It is really nice to have networking for all of these devices and get away from wifi. Even though the access point alone would have done, since I had wiring why not do that? I already owned to Flex Mini.

As for the drop downstairs I added and access point there as well. Now we have WIFI signals setup using the UI console so I can ensure the channels don’t overlap. Since implementing this setup, we haven’t had any problems for WIFI in the house. I also setup the UDM to update regularly and a nightly job to rotate the channels for all the access points. People bring things online every day that could conflict, doing a nightly scan and rotating to frequencies that are least used in our area ensure strong wireless access.

Lastly, I configured a 2.4Ghz network to allow me to have many of my devices for home automation. Most are old hardware and have problems even with 5Ghz. So I have a dedicated IOT network specifically for them. This is a key to making your setup work. Also you need to be aware of where you have bluetooth items that you need to control and ensure you have a bridge near them. For example, my lock works with bluetooth, and recently our home hub switched to my other HomePod upstairs.

Although there was one in range, bluetooth was able to inconsistently reach the lock. Enough so, that the home hub upstairs thought it could use it. I have since set preference to the one near the lock. This ensures that you have good experience.

One other networking note, be aware that many home automation devices buy their wifi boards and other components from other vendors. So, if you’re looking in the Unifi console, it will look like you have a ton of other devices that you don’t own. Don’t be alarmed, if you ever really feel like you want to disable one because you think it could be something malicious, feel free to do so. But, your lights might stop working. If that happens you will know what it is.

The other option would be to go into your configuration and label everything as you bring it online. I wish I had done that, but I started home automation a long time ago.

Why HomeKit?

I decided to use HomeKit for a few key reasons. To be honest, you can pick whatever version of home assistant you want. I know that Apple’s Siri isn’t even close to as good as the assistants from Google or Amazon. And the ecosystem for those two are less expensive. But, I think I can give you an an alternative reasons to look at HomeKit. Regardless, you should do what suits you best, and what aligns with your values.

The ecosystem

Stacey and I are 100% in the apple ecosystem. For Stacey, having the ability to see everything in one app and to manage it from her phone made it seem not as big of a tech hurdle. As you all guess I am the tech person in the household. I wouldn’t mind if there were 200 applications that I had to run on my phone to get things to work. But, It is very different for a Partner that doesn’t want life to be a hassle. She might use a PC for her work life and her personal PC, but all of her devices are all apple, from both phones to the iPad and the Watch, she has apple ecosystem. So something that plugs in to her personal devices is important.

Privacy

Local Processing — The Core Advantage

Apple Home is designed around local control, meaning commands for your smart devices are sent directly to those devices without leaving your home. By contrast, when you ask Alexa to turn on a light, the voice request is often sent to Amazon’s servers, where the command is processed — possibly passed to another cloud service — before the appropriate command is sent back. I don’t know about you, but have serious reservations about how other providers use my data if it goes back to them these days. I am not sure they are saying “James is turning his light on and off”. But, they might say “this many people have a porch light that turns off at sunrise and on at sunset”. What can I say, I was going through a paranoid phase prior to AI. And now I know why I don’t want my data to train everything in the world.

No Voice Recordings Sent to the Cloud

HomeKit stands apart by processing many commands on-device. Voice recordings are not stored or sent to Apple servers by default. By contrast, Alexa and Google may use location, search history, and usage behavior to personalize your experience and serve ads.

Whenever any Apple device sends an instruction to any HomeKit product, the communication is fully encrypted, and both ends of the communication are protected. Apple devices send a challenge to the smart home product saying “Prove you are HomeKit-approved before I will talk to you,” and won’t accept any instructions until it has received this proof.

Security

Apple is the most privacy-conscious of the three companies. All of your home data is stored directly on your devices, and Apple doesn’t run the web’s biggest advertising network or online store. Google and Amazon are fundamentally tied to data collection and advertising, which creates a structural conflict of interest that HomeKit avoids.

One benefit of local control is that if the internet goes down, you can still use the Home app to control your smart home devices over your local network. With Google Home or Alexa, an internet outage may stop you from being able to control your smart home at all and therefore data ever leaves your home network.

HomeKit Secure Video processes video locally on your home hub to detect motion and recognize people, pets, or vehicles. Only after that analysis is the encrypted footage sent to iCloud, where it’s stored securely — even Apple can’t see it. You add in that I am using Eufy Cameras where the data is stored locally it keeps all that footage as something that only we can see. Google’s Nest cameras, which upload video to Google’s servers for cloud-based AI processing… And do you really think they are deleting it?

It was discovered that freelance workers were able to listen to recordings from people’s (Amazon) Echo devices. Apple, by contrast, has built privacy as a core brand pillar and has consistently resisted pressure to weaken it.

So that is the thoughts for the upsides. But there are clearly tradeoffs. Lets talk about those now.

The Downsides

Limited device support

Apple has a strict certification process for HomeKit accessories. While this means that the number of devices that support HomeKit is fewer than those that support Google Home and Alexa, it also ensures a higher level of security for HomeKit devices. And due to the cost of certification, we often see these as premium only offerings. Which tend to be the more expensive side of the Market.

Higher Cost

As I mentioned these devices due to the certification process and cost to get into Apple’s walled garden are more expensive. Just the cost of entry for getting a HomePod or Apple TV is way higher cost than their Google competitors. There is a cost to getting certified, as you have to pass Apple’s standards for security and compatibility.

Apple Only Ecosystem

This is a pro for me, but a con for people that love green bubbles. Since you have to have an apple device to interact, you essentially have to have an apple phone, iPad, watch or something else to be able to manage the house via your device. This will come back into the conversation we will have later about how to make things be automated in ghost mode, or to make them usable by non-apple folks and also non-tech peeps.

Siri Sucks

Had to mention this today, as it is 100% true. But Apple is losing the Voice Assistant wars due to the fact that their model blows.. So much that they had a whole WWDC dedicated to talking about it, and then didn’t delivery on “Apple Intelligence”. Lets be honest, Siri is the least capabile voice assitant by a mile. But also, Apple has the most resources to solve this. And they can also buy their way out of the problem with Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The question is who will land this partnership. Google has to be a strong competitor, since they have partnered with apple forever for search. But, Gemini seems the least capable of the assistants.

Slower Innovation / Setup Complexity

This is clearly the truth. I mean, who builds for this when you can make a product with more security flaws and not meet some standards and sell it and make money… basically anyone that doesn’t want to cater to that market. Also, all the security requirements can make things have alot of additional setup time and complexity. I know I ahve personally, re-setup and managed a ton of devices. Also, apple is pushing thread, which might avoid some of this. But, I think they will still want some certification about how events are handled.

The TL;DR version

HomeKit’s privacy advantage is built-in, not just a settings toggle. Most of the other platforms can be made more private with manual adjustments, but HomeKit starts private by design — local processing, no ad profiles, encrypted device communication, and encrypted cloud storage even Apple can’t access.

If you are in the Apple Ecosystem, and care about who has access to your data and how it is being used, Apple is the clear choice.