Why Your Smart Home is About to Break (2026).

Sam Altman recently said that they have over 800 million weekly users on ChatGPT, but it's not their generative AI that's going to change your life in 2026. Your neighbor can feed her 15 cats with ChatGPT's recommendation, but that's not helping anyone, probably not even helping the cats, and definitely not helping your neighborhood. What is ready to change smart tech and your life in 2026 is called agentic AI. AI that can act on its own in order to accomplish a goal that you've set for it. In late 2025, Amazon showed us their new AI voice assistant wasn't just generative, it was agentic too. If you said you wanted to make a certain dish for dinner, Miss A Plus could use their extensive lineup of partners, as well as companies they own, to find the recipe, order the ingredients, and get them delivered to you. So all you're doing is setting the goal, and an agent will get you there. Hopefully you have Prime though, or that's going to be a costly day. It'll transform how we automate smart homes. Today there's basic forms that we fill out, and they're kind of limited in what they can do for us. They just aren't smart enough. And I can't tell an automation engine like that, that I want to keep my power bill under 200 bucks for the month. Agentic AI can handle that. And we've moved from research papers into implementation. Amazon and Google are just the start. And it's all based on you having a smart home app with all the info that an agent will need. Everything in smart tech is about to pivot. We aren't just getting new AI that makes Alexa look stupid. We're facing a massive component shortage that is going to skyrocket prices. 2026 is going to replace your assistants, empty your wallet, and change how you live. Let's give it. Not everything is super happy butterfly rainbow unicorns. There is a trend that's going to hurt worse than John Cena's retirement. Now I can't stop crying. On December 3rd, Micron announced they would stop selling their consumer RAM for PCs. They said this was done to make enterprise AI memory. That's what you'll hear in the news. No more RAM for your basement dwelling weirdo nephew's PC because the price is jumping. But it goes deeper and gets way uglier. Micron is a top three producer of DRAM and NAND. NAND flash memory is your SSD or your flash memory cards. Most storage on smart tech is flash memory today. DDR4 and 5 is used in all kinds of smart tech. Like smart TVs, IoT devices, networking gear, hubs, home appliances, and all kinds of robotics. It's a critical component. Micron is shifting to create high bandwidth memory for enterprise AI. And because those applications use a lot more memory per system, it's eating up a huge chunk of the overall supply on DRAM and NAND. It's creating a major shortage that could go beyond 2026. And the other producers of this stuff, Samsung, are just happy for you to pay more. It sounds like this could be a permanent shift. But you just heard me describe all kinds of smart tech that's going to be impacted by this. I reached out to a couple people I know in the industry, and there's a few things they are already having to do. Some companies are being allocated less than they wanted on an order. Some are downgrading the components they're using. For example, smart TVs are being downgraded to use DDR3 because they just can't get enough DDR4. Anytime a company has firmware, that's NAND flash. Or at the least, most of the time. And that is becoming really scarce. And in some cases, companies are already planning to cancel products or raise prices. Now, I know we think that everyone makes a million dollars every time they sell an IoT product. But actually, a lot of this stuff is on pretty slim margins. Robot vacuums. They aren't making a lot every time they sell one of those. So in the end, some AI good, some AI bad. If you look up the top 10 robots on Google, you'll find 10 humanoid robots that are probably not ready to go into your home. You'll also find an utterly narcissistic pattern to our development of tech. And that's a discussion I'd love to have another day. This year, I had a window glass cleaning robot, two robot lawnmowers, and heck, I had a robot snowblower. I also had a whole set of robot vacuums. R.I.P. Roomba, you'll sort of be missed. But one of the biggest trends and technologies that is ready to launch is home-based robotics. It's just not going to be the humanoid ones, at least not for most people. Because I don't know about you, but I don't got 20k laying around to buy a NEO with. Especially not a remotely operated weirdo in a suit, which is what NEO is in 2026. But what's happened is the culmination of a few technologies. AI and machine learning have gotten to a point where our robots can analyze what's in front of them. We've seen this with robot vacuums for years. It's very good now. Navigation and the tech associated with that has become very good as well. Gone are the days of watching your Roomba run into walls. Mostly because they won't go anywhere anymore. But robotics as a whole has become more reliable. And it's easier for smaller companies to access the tech and then reproduce it. This is a total tease for CES next month. But I've already seen a robot that isn't humanoid. And that has been built by a very small company in order to complete useful chores and other basic tasks in your home. It's been going this way for years. And while we just talked about the headwinds that are there for consumer-based robotics, 2026 will be the first year you're offered a reasonably priced robot that will accomplish some minor tasks for you. And from there, it will explode. Hopefully not the robot though. Today's video sponsor is Acara. And I'm really happy to show you their new FP300 presence sensor. We have a review out on this and I'll leave a link to that below. But I'm going to spoil it for you right now and say that this is my favorite smart home sensor ever. Its biggest feature is that it can sense when you've come into a room and it knows when you've stayed in the room, even if you're not moving around. It's true presence detection and it's fast and accurate. It makes lighting automations really easy. But if that wasn't enough, there are three other sensors. A light, a temperature, and a humidity sensor. This means you can create powerful automations that give you the right lighting level, the right temperature, or the right humidity. And the FP300 works in almost any app. From Apple HomeKit to Home Assistant and everything in between. And all of this is powered off just a couple of coin size batteries. So I'm happy to tell you to go buy one or many of the FP300 from Acara. Check out the links below. Let's do some rapid fire trends. Number one, digital health kind of sucks. And it's going to keep sucking in 2026. Companies keep launching new stuff that really don't do anything we care about. And I haven't seen any real meaningful advancements in sensors. Number two, by the end of 2026, having an AI feature will be a net negative to the general public. The computing assets that are going up in price are a great example of the way AI is running us over like the water boy. But as a follow-up prediction, companies will keep doing this until you vote with your cash. Number three, smart cameras are getting a huge jump in features. And not just from the matter stuff. I saw Amazon's AI able to recognize all kinds of different animals. Google can do the same thing. This is coming from AI. And it does mean you will either be charged monthly or you'll have to have that processing power in your home. And the processing power in your home is not coming in 2026. So buckle up for your sub. Number four, everyone's taking another crack at smart glasses, including Google. And I'd love a pair of smart glasses. But I still don't think we're ready for it. So companies are gonna try in a big way in 2026 to get you to put on a pair of tech-spackled glasses. But you're probably not gonna do it. Number five, smart TV releases in 2026 will tell you that they're getting brighter and have more colors. And I'm laughing at that one because that's every year. And it's stupid because I can't see any more colors. Number six, voice control in your home is making a comeback. And actually, there's a lot of really interesting voice-related technology being developed right now. But I think that the voice assistants are gonna have limited success until they become agentic fully. Basically, you need a super app and then you need an AI agent with access. One of my favorite trends at the end of 2025 is gonna be huge in 2026. And I frankly cannot wait. In the words of the fifth element, the most perfect of creatures. Okay, that's not exactly the right term. See, in late 2025, we now have a lot of smart tech that is carrying multiple wireless technologies or protocols built in. The Acara lighting products from mid-2025, their new FP300, the new Shelly Flood Gen 4, and actually a ton of the new Shelly Gen 4 products. SwitchBot has suddenly turned on Bluetooth as a method to communicate with Home Assistant and for a while now, Homie. That gives their products Bluetooth and Wi-Fi options in many cases. And all of these and more have come with more than one of ZigBee, Thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth available for you to use. What combination you get is up to the manufacturer, but regardless, you're getting these options and I think it's so important. It's just as important as Matter is, in my opinion, because this ensures that you can use the tech that works best in your home and in your situation. Whether it's Matter over Wi-Fi and ZigBee, which is the case on the Gen 4 Flood, or Matter over Thread and ZigBee, which is the case on the FP300, there's a trend of using a part of Matter and ZigBee together to solve a number of your smart home woes. And in the words of Lilu Dallas, One of the worst trends in smart tech has been companies who use your private data and either to their benefit or to sell to other companies. The motto, if it's free, then you're the product, is, well, usually true. But the tech industry appears to have learned. They're pivoting to local first and privacy-centric smart tech. Now, I'm not saying there aren't bad actors out there. I actually just put out a video where we go through the eight biggest tech fails of all time. And in that, I told the story where contractors were listening to your voice recordings. Check that video up there right now. It's a fun one, but it's things like that and many other examples of the public not trusting tech that have driven almost every launch that I have advanced knowledge of in 2026 to include either edge computing, local processing power, and or local in-home communication. This has been coming for a while and lots of 2025's releases don't require the cloud. A lot of these products will be AI-enhanced by cloud-based features. And I think there's still a lot of merit to those because, you know, they're going to be optional add-ons. And yes, they will cost you extra money. But the real reason a lot of this is happening with almost every smart tech product out there is matter. And that is one of the biggest trends of 2026. The matter standard was a huge disaster when it launched in 2022. It barely worked and the types of devices that we got were not all that exciting. Plus, you more or less just got an off and on command. It's almost as big of a disaster as Apple Intelligence was this year. The standard has improved every year though, adding important device types like robot vacuums, lots of appliances, lots of energy management. But in late 2025, we got matter 1.5. That included cameras and video doorbells. And there's even talk of local storage solutions for those cameras within the matter standard. And tying this back to our last section there, matter is local, meaning the cloud isn't required. There's a lot of privacy and security built right into the standard. Now matter 1.5 and its cameras also got a lot of different features. Gone are the days of those simple on and off commands as cameras got features like unlimited resolution, privacy and detection zones, and many more critical camera features that you know and love. Every launch I'm seeing in 2026 includes matter. We're going to see an absolute explosion of matter-ready cameras and video doorbells. And we might even have to admit that this standard is working. Certainly better than Siri. All of these trends, the technologies that are coming together are really going to change how we manage and how we use smart tech. The great news is that agentic AI and robotics are going to do a lot of the work for us going forward. Companies are trying to essentially kill the old way you're building automations into your life. Matter is trying to drive compatibility between everything. It's giving it that common language. So by the end of 2026, you're going to have a lot of compatibility and a lot of power in your pocket and in your home. But those market forces can turn these things a little sideways. Sometimes things like that cause tech to just disappear. And I made a video about eight smart tech products that just disappeared one day. It's right there on screen and it's a fun ride down memory lane. So check that video out. Otherwise, thanks for watching today. And of course, live smart.