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When the Design Requirements Are Perfect

The New Smart Home Line From Ikea

I’ve always quite liked Ikea’s smart home gear, as they’ve felt like good value for the price. However, with their latest batch of products, which are in stores now, it seems like they’re moving up to becoming the first thing I’ll recommend to most people! You know, if they actually work as advertised — which I haven’t got the chance to test yet. But I have a couple of devices in hand, so I’ll get to that!

However, I just wanted to shout out that I looooove the design requirements that they’ve chosen when developing these:

Everything should …

  1. … be dirt-cheap
  2. … support Matter and have a Thread radio1
  3. … use AAA batteries
  4. … have a simple, sleek, and light design
A back of recharchable batteries, next to five products: A remote with a spinning wheel, a moisture detector, a remote with two buttons, a motion detector, and a door/window sensor.

I don’t have to explain why the first one is good…2

Going for Matter and Thread is great for the future3 — and having a major player go all-in like this is good. They’ve also made sure to print the Matter code on every device, in an easy to find place, and also on every manual.

After having Flic buttons 🖇️ with coin batteries for a couple of years, having AAA batteries, with a higher capacity and more easily rechargeable, is fantastic. And it’s well worth making some devices larger than needed to get this.

The Aqara sensor is about half the height, and not much wider. It uses a small clock-type battery. The Ikea one has a AAA Varta branded battery.
Here compared to an Aqara sensor 🖇️. Also, even though Ikea makes good rechargeable batteries, you obviously don't have to use theirs!

Design is obviously subjective, but I think all of these look perfectly fine — which is all you need! (In time I’d like to see black versions of everything, though.)

I've opened up the packaging and laid out some of them on a table. The door sensor, moisture detector, and two remotes. They are all rounded and pleasant looking.

When making a large series of product for a big company like this, the key decisions, made early in the process, are so crucial. And it gives me great joy to see that Ikea, in my opinion, nailed those. Companies so often fumble here.4

Now, hopefully they’ll also work great! But I still think they deserve praise for the design requirements they set.

  1. At least the light bulbs can also run on Zigbee. ↩︎

  2. However, there’s also room for premium options later on as well! ↩︎

  3. However, turns out my Apple TV is too old to be an border router — and I can’t access the Thread radio in my Mac Mini. (Thanks, Apple…) ↩︎

  4. Probably because many of the large ones don’t need to make something great to make money, due to lack of competition… ↩︎