I'm super excited about this - 1 because it makes me believe apple is taking the smart home seriously and 2 because in theory it means faster and more reliable smart home networks

I'll believe Apple is taking smart home seriously when it

A. Stops assigning my 2018 HomePods as the home hub, which they are incapable of doing as they cannot act as Thread routers, so whenever they get elected to lead the reliability of scene changes and automations go down the tubes.

B. Rewrite/redesign the Home app to not be a colossal pile of garbage. It's awful on the iPhone, worse on the iPad, barely functional on the Watch, and a complete joke on the Mac.

Exactly.

Happy to see this. Thread is working well for me, but there are limited device options. I’m eager to see the ecosystem grow.

Also, putting a Thread radio on a Real Computer should make the protocol easier to experiment with. I would love to see more hackable utilities to inspect my Thread network.

If you're interested you can use Pyspinel[0], Wireshark and a $5 ESP32-C6/H2 to connect to and debug thread networks - it's what I use right now for the project I'm working on.

[0]: https://openthread.io/guides/pyspinel/sniffer

> Thread is a mesh network that links smart home devices together, extending their range and reliability. It is an improvement over Bluetooth

First time I've heard of Thread.

>Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)

> It is an improvement over Bluetooth

An improvement for who? Considering that bluetooth is used extensively to track people, I wonder what this will be used for. At this point I'd really like a laptop without any radios at all, or at least hardware switches to keep them off.

Will be? Thread radios exist in all of their Apple TVs and HomePod Minis and have for years. Thread is nothing new, nor is it secretive. It's internet capable 6LoWPAN over 802.15.4, nothing more. The average Mac spews more information while connected to a regular Wi-Fi connection by default for mDNS/zeroconf.

I will agree though, that hardware switches for these radios, even if unergonomic (say, only accessible on the logic board), should be there.

> or at least hardware switches to keep them off.

FWIW, this feature is common on older thinkpads. I really enjoy having a switch on the outside of the laptop to quickly toggle the radios, its a shame they're totally absent on newer laptops.

It's more like Zigbee, as the whole ZCL got pulled in.

My guess is that this will be some sort of extension of the Find My network that will allow peer-to-peer message delivery.

Any other takes?

A hidden radio to go with the microphone that is already there? Just what you need in your home. And since they don't tell you about the radio, they obviously don't give you a way to turn it off.

First of all, the Thread radio is off by default.

There's likely a feature in iPadOS 18 or macOS 15 that will take advantage of it. It's possible we could hear about it at next week's WWDC [1].

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc24/

Who has this sort of patience‽ I want to know and/or speculate now!

;)

Whenever I hear something like this, I always think - what nefarious purpose could this be used for?

Will this mean your smart home will have unstoppable connectivity you can't turn off?

is apple enabling a bunch of nest/ring/foo business models?

> Will this mean your smart home will have unstoppable connectivity you can't turn off?

No. Thread is a mesh networking protocol for smart home devices. A light switch, window sensor and a dehumidifier can be linked together. The light switch and the dehumidifier could be far enough apart where there would be connectivity issue; using thread, they can talk to each other via the window sensor.

I believe they're using the IPv6 non-routable address space. The way to remotely access these devices is through a border router, like a HomePod or an Apple TV. And because it's an open standard, all of the big guys—Apple, Google, Samsung and others—have come together on this standard, making it easier to mix and match smart home devices that previously only worked in Apple's or Google's or whoever's proprietary ecosystems.

Probably not - although that's "kind of" how thread is supposed to work, in practice it doesn't because there isn't a standard way to configuration / key material between thread networks. This [0] is a great ELI5 article on the problem if you're interested.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/23820078/matters-biggest-problem-ap...

These kinds of mesh solutions are rather omnipresent in IoT already, like ZigBee. Would am iPhone acting as a bridge do more harm than a smart bulb acting as a bridge?

The smart bulb doesn't have an internet connection so yes, absolutely.

How is that "unstoppable connectivity you can't turn off"? And why would Internet connectivity in IoT surprise us - that's what the "I" stands for.

Just a smart bulb itself is not really how you use that. For it to make sense you already have some kind of a gate/central device that you use to interact with the whole smart ecosystem. Such gate is often already Internet connected device (be it a Vendor specific hub, Home Assistant etc.).

An iPhone can do harm here as much as my weird Netatmo hub I have to use with my radiator valves...

Is there anything in the Thread standard that forces devices in the mesh to relay messages outside of the mesh?

Depends on your definition of "forces" - the protocol enforces ipv6 addressability, and has the concept of a "border router" that transports messages from the network the BR is connected to to the thread network.

Presumably the fear here is that iPhones/ipads/macs will be border routers by default and since they likely have internet access they would "force" the system to accept messages from outside the mesh.

I wonder if the chipset that Apple uses for Bluetooth/Wi-Fi also now includes Thread support built-in, and Apple didn't explicitly add support for Thread.

This is very concerning, reminds me of Amazon Sidewalk.

All I can think of is "Smart TVs" and the care you need to take to keep them from going online to exfiltrate your data. They won't ever need your Wifi credentials if they can just piggy back on this.

But with smart TVs you just need to not log it into the network, right? No one is buying a computer or phone and not giving it network access

My point is device manufacturers will just add Thread radios in their shitty spy devices and they will gain network access via Apple connected devices whether we like it or not.

That's what Amazon Sidewalk was designed to do. Your Alexa devices that already have network access would just gracefully allow other sidewalk devices network access too.

There are theories that smart tvs connect to open networks if they’re offline.

I think this will be a great move towards mass adoption of smart home devices, which still seems a bit niche.

Amazon IoT for example worries me because the lack of network boundaries, so like that I wonder if the same challenge arises with Thread.

I was hoping this was going to be an FM/AM radio in iPads and iPhones.

I wish all phones and tablets had an FM/AM tuner to play over the air content without an internet or cell connection.

Curious why would you ask that? It uses spectrum around 2.4GHz, so if presence/absence of WiFi doesn't bother you, this one should not either.