Apple to Launch Doorbell, Lock and Thermostat Developed With LG

Bloomberg has learned that Apple's upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat, and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with South Korea's LG Electronics. Let's get the details with our senior tech ed there, Nick Turner. So, yes, how unusual is such a partnership for Apple to do it with a second party like LG? And what does this tell us about future strategy as well? Yeah. When they do, what they call a second party deal, it's it's similar to what they've done with Belkin before and, some other some other companies, but it's fairly rare for them. It's a little bit closer than a third party deal where someone's just selling Apple accessories, you know, that that work with Apple obviously, but they're not sort of closely linked to the company. In this case, they really worked with LG to develop these products. They're gonna have the LG name on the products, but they're sort of a... In the background, Apple had a had a bigger hand in developing them. Of course, we have more established home device players like Ring and Nest as well. How will these devices fit in there, and how competitive could they be? Yeah. I mean, that's the big question. For Apple, the push into the smart home is really kind of a big bet for them. They've obviously had some products in this area before. They have the Apple TV set top box. They have the HomePod, which is similar to Amazon's, some of Amazon's Alexa based devices and and Google devices. But they haven't really had a breakthrough in this market. And if they really wanna to kind of make an... A name for themselves here, they're gonna have to have an ecosystem of devices, and that's gonna include some products that Apple itself sells and some, in this case, that are sold with the LG brand and then maybe some that are more of a third party arrangement where they just work with Apple's platform. But what you're gonna see is later this month, Apple is gonna release a home hub, and that really will kind of be the the crux of this whole push. And if that's successful, it's gonna help lay the groundwork for being, successful in this market overall. Yeah. How important is this smart home market? Is this just about a hardware push, or is it something more? I... As with everything Apple does, you you kinda wanna sell hardware, obviously, and and I do think they hope to sell a lot of these smart home hubs, which are basically kind of like a square screen that you might hang on your wall or put on a desk. They essentially wanna sell maybe multiple of these per household. You might put them around your house. So it could potentially be significant from hardware. But then there's also sort of the services that surround it and this kind of virtuous cycle on the Apple ecosystem, maybe you're more likely to buy other products, even an iPhone or whatever, because you have Apple devices in your home. So I think that's always in the back of their mind. But certainly, getting Apple products in places that currently Amazon or Google products are are residing is kind of a big part of it.