Should you avoid the new Aqara M3 Hub?

so aara just started shipping their new M3 Hub which we first saw at CES this year and it adds lots of new features to one of my favorite products the M2 Hub but well it's great in a lot of ways is it actually an update that you should avoid I'm Eric wander welcome back to my channel if you're new here we talk all about Apple and Smart Home Tech so if you're into those things consider subscribing and a special thanks to aara for sending me this M3 Hub before the release date to check out for you guys with no strings attached this video is not sponsored now there are a handful of companies out there that have hubs for their accessories to communicate with the rest of your smart home and those hubs can also act as a bridge connecting All Those sensors or accessories into your Apple home or your other smart home platform of choice now companies like Lutron and Philips Hugh have one Hub that they sell today and they haven't changed those hubs in years on the other hand a Cara has a whole variety of hubs from ones embedded inside cameras to something like the m1s or the M2 Hub and now the very full-featured M3 Hub as well and these hubs still work great at integrating all of your small affordable aara zigg sensors with the rest of your Apple home and other smart home devices and that's not to mention the other accessories that work with an aara Hub like their light strips light switches and my favorite smart buttons and I use all these things around my home now the new M3 Hub has a bunch of features I'm not going to get into in this video but one that stands out to me is that it now supports power over ethernet more smart home Bridges should really do this and that means that if you have a switch or router that supports it like me you can run a single ethernet cable to this Hub and that runs both power and data to the device editor Eric jumping in here you can also use the supplied USBC cable or any other means of USBC power instead of using power over ethernet and then you could just use Ethernet or Wi-Fi for the data connection and we'll talk a little bit more about my experience using power over ethernet in just a minute now if you're interested in some of aar's new matter over thread devices you can pair those with an M3 Hub and control them directly from aara systems personally I just add my matter over thread aara devices straight into Apple home and I haven't seen a reason to add them to my aara Hub yet just because I don't use any of the aara automation features and I still think this would apply to let's say new matter over thread aara devices that I might buy today I just don't know if it's worth the trouble to also put them with the M3 Hub unless you're using a car's automation now this Hub also supports matter so you can use the aara Hub as a matter controller and run a whole bunch of your smart home right off of this Hub so it can talk directly to accessories that aren't just from aara and you can use all of their Tools in their app for their automations now let's get to the setup before we talk too much more about features and where this product makes sense and maybe doesn't make sense so the design of the ethernet port at the bottom of the Hub has a little bit of a curve in it and I had trouble getting some of my thicker ethernet plugs to actually work in there and they just wouldn't click when they went into the ethernet port I had to use a thinner cable now once I had the secure connection I was easily able to add it in my acara app and you want to be sure like me to go and check for software updates from aara for the M3 Hub because is really good about shipping software updates all the time for even their not so new products you'll continue to get new features and stability updates but especially with a new product like the M3 they're always going to be coming out with new stuff so be sure in the setup process to update your firmware now from there you could add this Hub straight into Apple home but you'll want to actually migrate an existing aara hub first before you do that now this gets into where integrating this Hub with apple home is not as straightforward and easy as you might think now one of the features that a car talks about with this Hub is that it also has an automatic failover which means that if one of these hubs goes down and then you have an additional one in your home you could then have that one take over your automation well you can then deal with getting the first one back online and this is similar to what Apple does with let's say their home hubs where if you unplug the homepod mini that's running your smart home it'll automatically fail over to another working homepod Apple t or whatever in your house and well that idea sounds good the problem is that in apple home each Bridge brings in those accessories to Apple home and so the same accessory coming from a different Bridge appears as a different accessory to Apple home so you can't just migrate your devices from one acara Hub to another aara Hub and have them seen as the same device with the same automations in apple home so if you go forward with the upgrade aara does have a nice feature built into the app where you go into the settings of the new Hub and say that you want to migrate from an old Hub and then you can select your old Hub and it will bring over your accessories to that new Hub and then you can reset the old Hub and it'll just take care of all of that upgrade process for you but then you have to add the new Hub as a bridge into Apple home the advantage of doing the aara migration first is that then Apple home will walk you through the setup process of all of those related devices so then you can add them to different rooms and then once that process is done go through and add back your related automation to each device and you'll also want to be sure and remove your old bridge from Apple home if it wasn't already now I wouldn't be surprised if over time aara figures out ways to smooth this over with some changes in their software but a lot of the limitations here I put on Apple not necessarily aara I think overall aara is making this process as seamless as possible but it's still not fun if you have a lot of things set up on other aara hubs to move them to a new Hub and that really gets into whether this Hub is worth it for you or not it really seems like the M3 Hub is a super powerful device for those who want to run their Smart Home in aar's system and now you can control more than just aara devices through that thanks to matter but personally that doesn't really apply to me so well this looks like a really cool new piece of tech with a lot of great features I'm limited as an apple home user in what I can really take advantage of and so I think if you're looking at someone like me who's already in the Apple home ecosystem do you need to upgrade or should you buy the M3 Hub as a new aara customer I would say stick with the M2 Hub if all you're doing is bridging your aara devices into your Apple home potentially the price of the M3 Hub will come down over time and it is the newer technology so given how hard it is to upgrade an aara Hub within Apple home maybe it's worth just getting the latest technology now to try and last you the longest amount of time but in general I would say most people should avoid the M3 Hub unless you know it's for you for running specific aara automation or some fancy matter and thread integration you want to pull off or you just really love power over ethernet like I do now if you want to see some ideas of what you can do with a car's affordable sensors and buttons I have a video for you to check out here and on the other side if you're interested in Apple hom hubs and how those work and what's going in there you were confused about what I was saying in this video watch this video over here to explain everything you want to know and more about Apple hubs thanks so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Eric Welander

Views: 21,030

Keywords: Eric Welander, apple, apple ecosystem, HomeKit, Apple Home, Aqara, aqara m3 hub, aqara m3, aqara m3 review, m3 hub, aqara apple home, aqara homekit, aqara hub m2, aqara hub m3, aqara hub m3 review

Id: ZU0F6kIILIM

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024