The wonder of smart homes is being able to connect and automate all your devices, but it’s still important to have physical switches that can turn things on and off as you come and go throughout your house.
Logitech’s Pop buttons were introduced last year as one way to do that, and today they’re getting a major upgrade with the addition of HomeKit support. HomeKit support is enabled through a new Hub for the Pop buttons, which will be available exclusively through Apple at launch.
Hooking into HomeKit expands what the buttons can do in a huge way. They’ve always been programmable, so you can go into the Pop app and make them send commands to a variety of different connected devices. But they only worked with a subset of gadgets and lighting systems until this point. Now, with HomeKit, they’re able to control any device inside Apple’s growing smart home ecosystem.
A single Pop button can do three different actions: one with a single press, one with a double press, and another with a long press. That could let you set up a single button to turn devices on and off, activate a specific command, and trigger a preset that controls multiple devices.
It’s unfortunate that the Pop buttons require a hub, because that makes getting started with them a bit harder than being able to link them directly to an iPhone — a bit more expensive, too. The hub sells for $ 59.95 and comes with a single button, and additional buttons sell for $ 39.99. The Pop buttons aren’t changing at all as part of this announcement, so existing units can gain HomeKit support by being connected to one of the new hubs.
