I would like my lights to be brighter during the day than they are at night. And if I’m sleeping at home, I’d still like enough light that I’m not stumbling over the kids toys when I need to pee at 3am.
If I’m watching TV and it’s a bit cold, I’d like to be able to adjust the temperature from the couch… and in summer I’d also like to be able to cool the house down when I leave work (and when the sun is shining on my solar panels) rather than firing the air con up when I get home from work and the sun is no-longer on my solar panels. If the smoke alarms detect a fire… I’d like to be alerted even if I’m not at home so I can check a camera and call emergency services to put the fire out before everything I own is destroyed. And I hate the fact that my fridge uses a huge amount of power at night when my solar panels aren’t powering my home… it sounds like this new Matter standard will allow me to adjust the settings on the fridge by time of day which could potentially save hundreds of dollars per year.
Do I need all of that? No. But I’d like it.
The way things are right now, if a device is going to have a “smart” feature, then the smarts need to be in the device. For example some very expensive fridges have a full control system on the fridge that can be used to configure the defrost cycle (defrost uses a lot of power and commonly runs hourly). With Matter those smarts don’t need to be on the device - they can be on your phone or your TV or a home server.