is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Smart lighting is one of the most useful and enjoyable smart home upgrades you can make. The convenience of turning lights on and off with a voice command or having them come on at precisely the right brightness when you walk into a room, adjusted for the time of day, is a huge quality-of-life upgrade that you can’t truly appreciate until you try it.
The good news is that now is a great time to consider adding smart lights to your home.
The costs of smart LED bulbs, fixtures, and accessories, such as switches, are starting to come down, just as compatibility across smart home platforms and smartphones is going up — thanks to the Matter smart home standard.
All this means it’s easier than ever to add some smarts to your lighting. Here are a few of my favorite experiences and features that smart lighting can add to your home, along with tips on how to integrate them into your space.
Bring the outside in with Apple’s Adaptive Lighting
Changing the color temperature of your lighting is one of smart lights’ least-known but best abilities. While color changing is fun when you want to decorate for a holiday or celebrate your favorite sports team, changing the color temperature — the warmth or coolness of white light — can improve your environment every day.
In my home, I set the majority of my smart lights to use Apple’s Home’s Adaptive Lighting. This feature automatically adjusts the temperature of their white light throughout the day to mimic natural daylight: cooler and brighter light in the morning to help me wake up, shifting to warmer, more relaxing tones in the evening to help me wind down.
Adaptive Lighting runs in the background, so I don’t have to set up specific scenes for morning or evening lighting, and the light inside my home feels more like the light outside.
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