My 15-year-old daughter just got her learner’s permit, so when I was pitched a new gadget tailored to teen drivers, I was intrigued. The Miles Plug is a small device that plugs into your car’s OBD-II port and monitors location, driving habits, and vehicle health, along with emergency accident response and roadside assistance.

The idea is that knowing all these things should help me feel more comfortable when my daughter starts driving alone. I tested the (now discontinued) Ring Car Cam when my son was learning to drive, but he hated it and refused to turn it on; I wondered if the Miles could provide the same peace of mind without feeling as intrusive.

Billed as “a wearable for your car,” Miles is a tiny cellular and GPS-enabled device that connects to an app to deliver real-time location, alerts, and driving insights (speeding, hard braking, trip recaps). The app also features an AI chatbot called the Miles Mechanic that decodes warning lights, tells you how urgent a fix is, and estimates repair costs.

Miles was developed by cofounders Matt McGovren and Kit Klein, who have a solid smart home pedigree. They worked at Wink in the early days and bring combined experience from Amazon (Ring and Blink), Ubiquiti’s smart home line, and other companies. “We built Miles to support teens and parents together, and keep them on the same team,” said McGovren in a press release. “Parents and teens see the same trips and the same alerts with nothing hidden, building trust instead of suspicion.”

Miles is available today at mileslabs.com and costs $99, plus $180 for a year of membership ($279 total, or $15 a month). A three-year plan is $396 with the Plug included ($11 a month). All plans are paid upfront with no auto-renewal. Anyone in the family can download and use the app, with each driver getting their own profile and alerts. Miles says it’s compatible with most gas and hybrid cars from 2008 onward and some EVs (there’s a compatibility checker).

While the prices seem steep, McGovren’s pitch is that it covers several services you might already be paying for: “You could piece together a roadside service, a family tracking service … and then you’re looking at $30, $40 a month,” he said in an interview with The Verge. And, unlike your car’s own branded app, Miles isn’t selling your data. Automakers have been caught collecting and selling driving data, with GM being banned from selling data to brokers for five years.

McGovren says Miles will never sell vehicle, trip, or location data, and the app has no ads: “You’re the customer, you’re not the product. Your data is not the product.” He says, “All the vehicle and trip data is encrypted,” adding that “the most sensitive data uses additional layers of encryption, including application layer envelope encryption.” Additionally, the location data is tied to the car, not the phone, so it stops tracking when you walk away. The app lets you download your data, stop location collection, and delete your account and all its data.

I set up Miles in my 2014 Toyota Highlander I nicknamed Tanya and have been using it for a couple of days. Setup was simple, and the app is clean, uncluttered, and easy to follow. It took me through a few setup screens, including asking to share my phone’s location to relay data from the Plug over Bluetooth when cell service is spotty. I plugged it into my OBD-II port, and it read my VIN and correctly identified my car.

It logs every trip with route, distance, time, and driver initials (I haven’t had my daughter download the app yet; I’m interested to see whose phones it connects to when we’re both in the car). Arrived- and left-home alerts came through promptly, and the events tab flagged hard acceleration and a cluster of three hard-braking alerts when I was running a little late to collect my daughter from work.

I like the home card, which shows a vehicle health summary: engine OK, fuel 63%, battery 13.5V, and the odometer reading. I played with the Miles Mechanic chatbot and asked how my car is and what upcoming maintenance is due; it answered in plain English, telling me the cabin air filter is due at about 140,000 miles, and the oil change and tire rotation at 142,500.

I haven’t been testing it long enough to comment on battery drain, an issue with earlier products in this space. “It goes to sleep when your car is not driving or not on,” says McGovren. “We use a little bit of data to wake up and sync, but [that] doesn’t have a material impact on the battery.” He advises removing it if you won’t be driving the car for a while.

Beyond car battery life, an obvious concern for prospective users is how long Miles the company will last. Startup Automatic had a similar idea back in 2016, launching the Automatic Pro for $130 that plugged into your OBD-II port, tracked mileage and location, and monitored for crashes over a 3G radio. The service shut down in 2020. Miles is basically Automatic but with a business model; Automatic didn’t initially charge a monthly fee, Miles does.

McGovren says he and his team have seen a lot of “scar tissue from the smart home,” with companies that “thought they could make money later.” Both founders were at Wink during its outage, bankruptcy, and eventual sale to will.i.am’s company. Charging for membership upfront is meant to avoid that type of outcome. He says the company is “well capitalized” and offers a 60-day money-back guarantee to users.

Automatic also had several smart-home tie-ins, but at launch Miles doesn’t connect to your smart home. McGovren says they have an MCP server in beta that could deliver “all of this information … to your AI of choice, your home assistant of choice,” he says. “And now the car becomes part of this bigger ecosystem. We aren’t just trying to tie you into our app.” He envisions a future where you own your car’s data and can connect it to any service you want, and be able to ask Alexa, Siri, or Google, “When’s my next oil change?” or “How much gas is in my car?”

Miles is pitched as a solution for monitoring your teen driver, including notifications of possible crashes and risky driving, without also having to monitor their phone. But it also feels like a good solution for anyone with an older car or who doesn’t want to rely on data-tracking apps from insurance companies or car manufacturers but wants easy access to their car’s data. I plan to test it more thoroughly, hopefully try out the MCP integration, and follow up with a full review.

Photography and screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Correction, Oct. 20: An earlier version of this article misstated how the platform handles encryption based on an incorrect statement from Matt McGovren. The sensitive data is protected using additional layers of security, including application-layer envelope encryption, rather than end-to-end encryption.

For more than a decade, Apple has told other companies to build smart home devices for its platform. This week, Apple launched its own. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, all codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. They arrive alongside HomeView, Apple’s first smart display.

Even after 12 years of HomeKit, Apple’s smart home ecosystem still felt underdeveloped, especially compared to the competition. Amazon’s and Google’s ecosystems support more products, and both have popular in-house brands: Ring and Nest. Apple had nothing of its own to point customers to as an Apple experience — and now it does.

But why now? And does Apple actually add anything new here, or is this mostly packaging? At Apple’s “Welcome home” event in New York this week, I spoke with Kaiann Drance, vice president of product marketing for home at Apple, about the company’s new approach to the smart home and what this means for Apple’s commitment to Matter, the interoperable open smart home standard it helped found.

Why now?

Drance says a big reason for making this move into hardware now, when HomeKit launched in 2014, was the development of the right technologies. The first was Matter, which provided the ecosystem. The second was AI, which brought a more conversational Siri voice assistant. Both were necessary to create a dedicated home device in HomeView. “With the magic of Siri AI, it comes together in a way that we haven’t been able to deliver before,” Drance says. “That’s been a really critical piece of bringing this all together.”

The bigger play here is HomeView as a gateway to the smart home for Apple’s users. Buy one for playing music, guided cooking recipes, and checking your calendar, and you might soon want a camera or smart lock to go with it. Drance says they’ve seen that once people try a single smart device and find it easier than they expected, it “unlocks this delightful understanding of what’s possible once you bring these products into the home.” She argues that most people just don’t know what a smart home can do.

She’s not wrong. The biggest barrier to buying smart devices is that people don’t see any value in the products, according to research from Parks Associates. Privacy and security concerns and complexity also rank high, along with cost. While Apple isn’t addressing the cost concern here — the products start at $200 — the other elements are part of its pitch: one-tap setup, your data stays yours, one app to run it all. Apple’s stamp of approval also carries a lot of weight. “People who own Apple products are very, very loyal, and there is a large user base,” says Elizabeth Parks, president and CMO at Parks Associates.

From a choose-your-own adventure to a tailored solution

Until now, Apple Home has been a bit like a buffet: You can pick from any brand that supports HomeKit or Matter and hope it all goes together. The Home Collection is more like the chef’s choice, a short list of dishes Apple promises will pair well. Drance says that’s what some customers were asking for. “There is a lot of choice with Matter, and there’s a lot of great products out there,” she says. “But sometimes we do get asked, ‘Hey, what product should I put in the home?’”

Rather than build devices itself, Apple chose to codevelop the lineup with partners that “have their own expertise in the home.” Both have a global footprint and home experience, she says, “LG more so in consumer products, Schneider through home build and home installations.” Drance says it was a ground-up collaboration with Apple bringing “the design aesthetic that would be suitable for the home and suitable to go with our family of products.” The company is also partnering with ADT through Apple retail stores to help people install the devices.

Drance says setup and ease of use were also a big focus in the products’ development. “The one-tap setup was really important to make it so easy, having no need for a separate account, no need for a separate app,” she says. “We just wanted that simplicity to be at its core, and of course, the privacy that we’ve developed together with our partners.” She says everything integrates through Apple Home; you don’t need to create an LG or Schneider account, and all data is end-to-end encrypted, so only you can access it.

Drance was clear that the Apple Home Collection isn’t replacing the buffet — the hardware ecosystem that has grown up around Apple Home. “We still have this incredible ecosystem with Matter, and with Works with Apple Home, that is going to remain,” she says. “We know that homes are not a one-size-fits-all solution, so our customers will continue to have that choice, and we remain committed to building that ecosystem as well.”

The hardware mostly backs that up. The lock, thermostats, and sensors are Matter-compatible; the lock supports Aliro and works entirely locally, and every device supports Thread. The exception is the cameras, which use Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video, not Matter. That’s the biggest lock-in. I was surprised Apple didn’t announce Matter camera support. But the Thread radios suggest the hardware might be Matter-ready, and Apple may be waiting for the Matter camera standard to support encrypted uploads, something HKSV already does.

So, what’s the benefit?

Does the Home Collection do anything other Apple Home devices can’t? In theory, no; in practice, yes. “What we’ve done with Apple Home Collection is we’ve added another layer on top of that, that deeper integration,” says Drance.

There aren’t features exclusive to the Home Collection; it’s more that Apple is saying all the features will be here. It’s a bit like Google making a Pixel phone to show Android developers what Android can do: Apple’s products come with the full suite of capabilities the platform offers.

According to Apple, setup is as simple as tapping your iPhone to the device, like pairing AirPods, with no extra account or app needed and no scanning required. Every device uses Thread to stay connected if Wi-Fi drops, and Apple says each can update its own network credentials when you change your Wi-Fi. This could address the offline-device problems that plague Apple Home. Everything is end-to-end encrypted, and the cameras keep recording to onboard storage if your Wi-Fi drops.

The devices also support Apple Home features other manufacturers have been slow to adopt. The LG lock is only the third to offer hands-free Home Key unlocking over UWB, and both thermostats work with Apple’s Clean Energy Guidance and Adaptive Temperature, which adjusts around your location and sleep schedule.

At least that’s the promise. We’ll have to test these devices to see how well they deliver.

A curated garden path

Together, Apple’s new devices form a polished, cohesive starter kit for the smart home — albeit an expensive one. The cameras, lock, and thermostats cost $200 to $400, and camera history requires an iCloud Plus plan. As Drance said, the smart home isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, so this won’t work for everybody. If you already have a Ring doorbell or Google Nest Hub, this probably isn’t for you. Instead, with this collection, Apple is trying to guide its existing customers who haven’t bought a video doorbell or smart lock yet down a curated path into the smart home.

However, Apple faces a tougher challenge in the broader market: It’s arriving late. The smart display category is already mature; millions of homes have Echo and Google smart displays. Millions more have Ring or Nest doorbells, neither of which will work with HomeView at launch.

As a smart home platform, Apple Home ranks third in adoption, behind Google, with Amazon holding a big lead, according to Parks Associates research. But customer loyalty to those platforms isn’t guaranteed. Four in five smart-home households would consider switching, Parks says, especially if another platform lets them control everything in one place. “Interoperability will be critical, but the bigger prize is owning the consumer relationship,” she says.

With its Home Collection, Apple isn’t reinventing the smart home; it’s trying to make it easier to get into one.

I’m just going to come right out and say it. I love the approach Apple has taken with the HomeView. I think it’s the shared, always-available household interface that my family might finally use. Is Apple’s first smart display my dream smart home dashboard? No. But is it the right product for Apple Home at this moment? Absolutely.

A lot of initial reactions to the $299 HomeView (which looks like a giant Apple Watch on a flatter metallic HomePod Mini) ask why you would want it when you can do most of what it offers on your iPhone or iPad. And yes, its features replicate many of the things you already do on the devices you use all the time. But that’s kind of the point. HomeView gives you another interface for those things, but crucially one that is always powered, always unlocked, and always in the same spot in your home, making it easy to walk up to and interact with.

I’ve tried using an iPad to control my smart home, run my family’s calendar, and be a shared device for controlling music. It wasn’t great. I’ll have to test HomeView, of course, but my initial impression is that this could be a much better solution for those use cases.

Most iPads are more expensive, have worse speakers, and do not like to be plugged in all the time (I present my sad, warped iPad Mini as tribute). An iPad can’t be a hub for your Apple Home; HomeView can. An iPad famously isn’t a good multiuser device, and controlling home devices on one requires it staying logged in to your personal iCloud account; HomeView offers Apple’s first crack at easy multiuser switching.

Apple designed HomeView as a communal device that sits in a fixed place in the home. This means it’s always where you expect it to be, which matters when you want to adjust the thermostat or can’t find your phone and want to check your calendar. Not having a battery or detachable screen is a feature for me, because devices that do inevitably wander off and die under a couch cushion.

And while many people are fine using their personal phones and tablets to interact with the digital world when at home, and don’t want yet another device with a screen on their countertop or wall, the millions of Echo Shows, Google Nest Hubs, Skylight Calendars, and the like in homes today are a good indicator that there’s interest in this type of interface.

As Apple’s uncharacteristically chaotic launch video shows, HomeView targets a new demographic for the company: busy, Apple-centric households. One feature I’m most interested in is HomeView’s role as a home video phone. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to call my daughter when I’m not home, and her phone is dead or on silent? Based on Apple’s video, if she’s home, my call can now ring on the HomeView. I’ve occasionally used the drop-in feature on Echo smart speakers to get her attention, further proof of the advantage of always-on home devices.

I see HomeView as filling the awkward space where families don’t want phones at the dinner table or on the kitchen counter, but still want to check what time Zoey’s soccer game is or look up the origin of French toast (yeah, just kidding). This inevitably ends with one person pulling out their phone, which gives everyone else implicit permission to do the same.

Smart displays and speakers from Amazon and Google already help with this to some extent, but Apple’s version comes without ads (see the Echo Show) and may have a longer lifespan (RIP Pixel Tablet). Siri AI’s much-hyped “personal context” capabilities, in which it can scan your text messages and emails and serve up relevant information to up to six members of your household, also give it an edge here.

I asked Kaiann Drance, vice president of product marketing for home at Apple, why Apple chose now for its biggest smart home push yet. She said Siri AI and the personal context it brings, which she called Apple’s “privacy story,” came together with a device designed specifically for the home. “With the magic of Siri AI, it comes together in a way that we haven’t been able to deliver before,” she said.

Siri AI made this possible because it’s “much more capable,” said Lilian Rincon, vice president of product marketing for AI at Apple. She also pointed to its new conversational abilities. “It’s great because you can just ask it to change the temperature on your thermostat in a very natural way. As the Siri AI capabilities continue to evolve, the home experience is fitting to be able to interact with in this natural way.” On why now, Rincon says the natural-language shift is the point where AI goes mainstream. “Because now it can be … my mother-in-law or the Gen Z who’s in college, both of them can use this in the way that they naturally speak and get what they want.”

Siri AI in the home has another big advantage over the competition: It doesn’t say too much. Based on the demos I saw, and my time using Siri AI on the iPhone, when you ask it to do something, it does it without peppering you with follow-up questions. Rincon confirmed this is by design. “A lot of these assistants out there are always asking questions because they want more information,” she said. “For us, it isn’t about that. We’re there to get it done, take an action for you, show you what you need to get done, and then really get out of the way.”

My first reaction to hearing about HomeView’s smart home features, which are basically just what the Apple Home app on your phone can do, was disappointment. I had hoped that, along with new hardware, Apple would bring more functionality and deeper Apple Intelligence integration to Apple Home to make the smart home smarter. I’m still waiting on that.

On reflection, I’m okay with this — for now. Apple trying to make the smart home easier for everyone to use can only be a good thing. As always, the smart home’s most important goal is to come up with an easier way to turn on the lights.

HomeView’s simplicity may put off hardcore home automation enthusiasts, but I’d argue it’s perfect for their long-suffering spouses. I’ve tried every version of physical smart home control interface in my home, and you know who hasn’t used any of them? My family.

Because my family all have iPhones, and because the HomeView will always be there and will feel familiar, I can see them actually using it. That means I could set up a full Home Assistant instance and run a detailed dashboard on a tablet in my office, then feed the scenes and devices into Apple Home so my husband and daughter can just tap to control them on a HomeView in the kitchen.

HomeView may not be the smart home computer I want Apple to make, but it is the smart home device Apple needed to make. It doesn’t have to run all the iPad apps or try to be a bigger version of my iPhone; it just needs to make the smart home accessible to everyone in the house. If Apple has pulled that off, it could be more valuable than any new smart home feature I’ve been wishing for.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge