I Investigated IKEA’s Ridiculously Cheap Tech

This is a Philips Huegh smart bulb and I had to pay £55 to buy one of these here in the UK last week. That made me pretty angry. Then I found out IKEA literally starting this year has decided to become a tech company. They've just had their biggest ever smarthome push and their light bulb is £7. So I bought every single IKEA tech product I could find. No, literally. I bought their new giraffe lamp. I found smart tea lightss. I even discovered a cabinet that secretly opens up into an entire gaming station. Where are you? So, carrying no fewer than 47 IKEA products, I scured back home, desperate to find out how this stuff can actually be as good value as it seems to be. It was not much of a scurry by the end. So, I've only just started setting up these products, obviously prioritizing my new home, the gaming closet. But right now, at least this feels a little bit too good to be true. Like these mad lads made a MagSafe charger for £9. Yes, it's very light and it can wobble. But if you just stick it down, that's insane value. And the lighting. I thought this £7 smart bulb would have some very obvious caveat when I plugged that in. But there's an app. You turn it on and off from your phone. There's a brightness slider to the side and you can choose any color on the spectrum. I have found that Philips does also sell an affordable bulb, but even their absolute cheapest is three times the price of IKEA's. It's the same brightness as IKEA's. Oh, yeah. And it scores an F in energy efficiency compared to a D. And the thing with all this IKEA stuff is it's still based on matter, which is the latest standard in smart homes designed to be kind of like a shared language that lets all types of devices from all different companies play nice with each other. It means that I could say to this Alexa hub, "Alexa, light blue." Okay. Okay, that works. Or I can use a 4B IKEA matter remote. And it's so sick cuz clicking down turns the light on and off. You can scroll this wheel. 7 out of 10 satisfying. But then also press down at the bottom of the remote to switch which group of matter devices that I want to be controlling. The idea being that those devices could be almost anything, even one of these. So, this is the new IKEA color light strip. £13, by the way, compared to the minimum that I can find fillets for, which is 50. But I guess what they've cut to get there is this doesn't directly connect to anything. It's not matter. The only way you typically control it is this button to turn it on and off and this one to change color. But yeah, so what you can do then is connect it up to one of these matter smart plugs, which will then let my Mattera smart remote talk to it. And it has memory. When I turn it on, it's remembering what color it was set to before I turned it off. Am I nerding out over furniture store LEDs? Yes, but the configurability here for the money is like everything I've been searching for. Or so I thought at this point. Things are about to take a dark turn soon. IKEA has also made a bunch of matter sensors. And yes, I've also managed to catch them all. So, there's a 7 lb door sensor which I've stuck inside the gaming cabinet cuz it means every time this door closes, this part of the sensor, which is just a magnet, changes the magnetic field that's picked up by the hall effect sensor in the main body, which then sends a matter signal out to everything here, including all the non-smart stuff like these light strips because of those matter plugs. That was so well timed. And then because it's configurable, I can also get it to like ping me a notification to let me know that the door has been opened or closed. There's a motion sensor, too, which can do the same thing, but in response to, let's say, you walking into the room. And you can do crazy stuff like this. Right here is IKEA's temperature and humidity sensor. £5, by the way. And you could set this so that the moment it picks up that the lights are making this cabinet hot beyond a certain point, they just get switched off. And by the way, this isn't just running matter, the universal language. It's matter, but based on a layer of technology called Thread, which should be better than the more traditional Wi-Fi smart home tech of Bu. Thread essentially means that instead of each of your products needing to communicate with your Wi-Fi router first, they actually just talk directly to each other. And each one acts as its own signal repeater. So, it extends the range way past most routters. And it's a self-healing system. So if one device goes down, another one can just fill in that gap and keep the network going. You do still need a hub, but the cool thing about Thread is that that hub can be any kind of newish smartome product like an Amazon Echo or an Apple TV 4K, things you might already have. To be clear, plenty of companies are already using this combination of matter over thread, just not at this price. I don't actually understand like how is this even a viable business model? This is a £5 product. One pound is just tax here in the UK. So IKEA is making4 pound from selling this. How in4 pound are you managing to cover the temperature and humidity sensor itself, the system on a chip required to run the thing, the materials, the display, the assembly, the packaging, the cost of retail, and then somehow still keeping room to make a bit of profit. Okay, I've just gone into a bit of a rabbit hole online and turns out you can actually find the exact sensor that IKEA is using in one of their products, their air quality meter, which they're selling for £25. But it's this look, the Sension Sen 63C. And if you search that up, this one sensor alone is worth like £28. So yeah, obviously IKEA is getting massive bulk discounts on parts, but still this would be a bit like if someone was selling a complete gaming PC for the price that you could also find just like the graphics card inside of it alone. I think IKEA has a particularly strong incentive right now to establish themselves in this space. So, they've chosen to make next to no money at all on this stuff because they know that they're already the home company and if they get this tech transition right, they will also become the smart home company and that could be worth billions. I've just tried some of their bedroom products and this stuff is not matter. It's actually a bit less smart, but it might be even better value than the smart stuff. Like for £150 a pop, we've got things like the cabinet lights. They've got motion sensors inside to pick up when you open doors or drawers. Nice and bright, too. And then the nightlight. You might remember I was absolutely in awe at Xiaomi's motion sensing nightlights. They're £12. The IKEA nightlight is £2. Still seems to work just as well and lasts 6 months on battery apparently. There's an interesting thing I've started to notice with IKEA products. Oh, still works. This company is not really like most tech companies where they come across like they're designing products with one hive mind and each product has the exact same philosophy. Every IKEA product seemingly has its own assigned designer. Maybe it's like whoever came up with the idea for something becomes the lead producer of it, which is probably pretty normal when it comes to furniture, but kind of weird with tech cuz it means that each product functions a bit differently. But then the upside is some of this stuff is so creative. Like look at this really nice weighty glass bowl. This is where you chuck your stuff like your keys, your chewing gum, your micro Game Boy Color for some reason. But then you can stick your phone onto this magnetic park and that's a charger. And then press down. It's a light too. I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty delightful for £15. These speakers are £5 each. I say each because the idea is you just press one button to pair two of them together. And you can do this with up to a hundred of them. You probably shouldn't. They don't sound very good, but you can, and that's kind of fun. Or tea lights. Up until this point, I've only ever used real tea lights, but then, you know, they die after one use. Or ones powered by those little coin cell batteries that are a massive hassle to keep changing out. But IKEA has made a USBC charging station where each telight docks when you're done with it, blinks to confirm that it is charging. And then when charged, IKEA has claimed that they can last 35 hours each. That number sounded crazy to me, so I tested it myself. And uh yeah, they weren't kidding. Teite battery tests. That's where we're at now. What are they sitting on? An IKEA table that is also an air purifier. And credit to David Wall. The thing's so damn efficient. Pull out these clips that lets you take the top off. Then you can see your filter in case you want to change it. A hidden compartment where the power supply hides. Love that. And then the cable wires through the back of the leg. David, can you organize my life, please? Oh, and then my favorite. It's a giraffe lamp. You push the head to turn it on. Gosh. And then it'll turn itself off after 15 minutes. Just enough time for a quick Pokémon Champions. Then you can even take the light off and use it to make sure you can see your way to the bathroom at night. Now, there are some things I can see which partly explain the low prices, like the fact that IKEA seems to refuse to give you batteries unless they absolutely have to. This giraffe takes doubleas's. All of these sensors take AAA's. And I guess that kind of helps IKEA because then they can sell you theirs. And then the charger for those batteries, too. But I think the biggest thing is IKEA's volumes. I actually just cannot wrap my head around the fact that this company has sold over 140 million of this one bookshelf. So IKEA can place enormous orders for parts and get a very good deal doing so. And it actually feels like they specifically reuse those parts in as many different products as possible to maximize those savings. And even more importantly, unlike most companies who make home accessories, who probably sell a few thousand units and want to make big bucks with each one, IKEA does not care. As long as they're making pennies per product, they're still doing fine overall. That's why for years now IKEA has been able to sell things at silly low prices when they want to things like these simple sensors. And I guess now they're seeing it as their chance to start applying that to the smart home now specifically because matter is kind of like the stars aligning for IKEA. You might know that for the last decade, the smart home was basically owned by premium companies like Philips Huegh, Sonos, Google Nest. Because to actually make a smart home that worked needed a ton of initial R&D to create a system and a set of hardware where each thing can talk to each other, you had to be primarily a tech company. So, up until this point, there's been no such thing as the mass market middle ground, where someone goes in to buy a sofa or a cabinet, but then casually adds a smart bulb to their basket just because it's right there at the till. It's been too complicated and priced way too high. But matter is designed to fix that. In theory, it takes away all of that expensive R&D that used to cost billions. All of that will my bulb actually talk to my speaker engineering, that's now baked into the standard itself. So you don't need to be a tech company anymore. You just need to make yourself matter compatible. And no one wins more from this than the company with hundreds of millions of people specifically walking through their doors while in the process of setting up a home. One area where it definitely does pay to go high-end though is the eight sleep bed I'll sponsor which I've been using for over a year at this point instead of the bed that I spent 10 times more money on because I tested them and to my shock/ despair this made me sleep better and it's not even close anymore cuz you know how every single sleep device measures your sleep score with a number right well eight have just upgraded their app with a sleep agent powered by AI that can also tell you why you slept the way you did and then fix it Like the last two weeks, I've been kneede working on an investigation video, and I've been stressed. But this app is not just noticing that and giving me suggestions for how to fix it by itself, but it's also taking matters into its own hands and making 30 different adjustments while I sleep. And with my code boss, you can get $350 off the latest Pod 5. You have 30 days to try it, but I don't think you'll be sending it back. It's falling apart, guys. I know I did the whole spiel about why all this matter stuff should be incredible, but it's been 4 days of living with our IKEA tech and it is not going well. Like this doughnut lamp, which by the way on its own is already kind of disappointing cuz it's the exact same tech as that £7 smart bulb. Same app, same features, but just now because it's in a mouth blown glass container, it's £55. It doesn't even have zone lighting or the ability to do gradients. But more importantly, how is the connection process this terrible? We've been going through loop after loop of discovery trying to find the thing. And after seven failed attempts, it randomly works on the eighth, even though we've changed nothing. Some of the bulbs have the same thing. Like, we put six of them in this column light over here. Bought them all the same day. Five worked perfectly. One just would not connect. It tries to find it for two full minutes and then just says unable to add accessory. I've noticed sometimes the QR code on the box lets you add these products onto your network. Other times it does not. And then the only thing that seems to work when that happens is resetting the hub and then manually entering the unique device numbers that you can find on the products. And while I've been dealing with that, some of the lights that originally set up fine have now started showing that they're offline when they're clearly on. My precious matter remote has gone super laggy sometimes. That should have turned it off. Didn't like here. What's the matter? Do you want to press it 100 times and see what the success rate is? Oh my god. I don't want to. One. This is content. No. No. Yes. How much longer do we have of this? 46 successes. Oh dear. Still, you know, you see that and then you think maybe it's just me. Then I looked online. Reddit is full of I bought IKEA's Matter products. Nothing will connect. There's some positive reviews on the IKEA site, but then nearly as many one stars with pretty much each person talking through everything they've done to try and get this stuff to work and then how it still doesn't. I even found someone who's tried to pair 59 of these matter remotes and they've only managed to successfully pair 29. They've got this 11step troubleshooting technique they followed and according to them, it fixed nothing. So, they're estimating a 50% defect rate, which kind of horrifyingly lines up with the near 50% negative reviews on their site and the 50% success rate of the remote. I mean, regardless of which way you look at it, it's completely unheard of. What if your car only started 50% of the time? The more I look into this, the more it feels like ultimately matter is just not ready. It could be, and it should be the solution. And one day it still might be. But it seems like the main companies who built matter, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., they invested in it because it would help to promote the idea that anyone could have a smart home. But individually, none of them actually has an incentive for it to succeed. If matter becomes a viable mainstream smart home solution, then who's going to pay three times the price for a Google Nest branded doorbell? How will Amazon make sure that you also subscribe to Prime and do all of your shopping on Amazon.com? Matter will basically open up the gates for companies like IKEA to whip up something for a Fiverr that works just as well and that's not going to lock you into any company's ecosystem. You'll notice as well if you pay close attention that Samsung has actually been really great with all this matter stuff. Their Smart Things is usually among the first platforms to support each new Mattera version, often within a few months of release. But Apple, Google, Amazon, sometimes we're talking a year behind for the same updates. And that's probably not random. Samsung is the most aggressive because Samsung has the least to protect. They don't have the dominant voice assistant or the dominant phone ecosystem. So, an open standard like Matter has a lot of upsides for them. They make tons of stuff like fridges, washers, and ovens. All matter is going to do is help those products work better in other companies systems. It's really those companies, the ones who make those systems like Amazon, who have the most to lose and so are the most reluctantly trudging towards actually making matter good. and instead focusing their efforts on trying to ensure that the best experience with their products comes when you use all of them and you do so via their app. And it feels like all of this politics has left IKEA a little bit stuck. They clearly saw the potential of matter. They dived head first into it, but it's just not ready yet. And while IKEA are not the only ones supporting matter, the difference is that IKEA's products depend on matter because they don't have their own robust ecosystem to fall back on. So, for the sake of making this smartarthome dream accessible to the masses, I really hope IKEA can get over this incredibly bumpy start. But I'm not holding my breath.