3 Hue Lights with bridge, $119 at Costco

I did. Best Buy has only three bulbs too.
But theirs comes with a switch looks like.

Me too

(no message)

I think all I got out of that was the cup of coffee you paid for.

You have no idea unless you have them.
Totally worth it.

Do you have a $19.99 flip phone?

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You have no idea unless you have them.
Totally worth it.

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i have 3 from a fire sale....there is nothing you can say that would justify a $40 light bulb. you can get wifi bulbs that as extremely close to the intensity and color saturation as Hue bulbs. While the knock of brands are hit or miss, you can find them.

And dont get me started on the Hue strip lights. talk about a ripoff.

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there is nothing you can say that would justify a $40 light bulb. you can get wifi bulbs that as extremely close to the intensity and color saturation as Hue bulbs. While the knock of brands are hit or miss, you can find them.

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i'm not necessarily a fan of the wifi bulbs but they are 1/3 the cost, they are newer, brighter and easy to set up and manage because you don't have to fool around with zigbee networking and a hub.

having said that, hue is the gold standard and there are tons of fun apps you can download and very robust support from apple, google and amazon. most of these wifi smart bulbs have questionable apps and support that could fold at any time meaning your bulbs could lose the ability to be smart. in theory zigbee is a local-control tech but hue implements it through their hub & cloud if you're wanting any type of voice control and even if you have an all local solution like hubitat or home assistant they can only access hue through their cloud api as well.

so in short, hue is great for what it is but without finding a fire sale its definitely overprice and there's a long lead time between bulb updates so better, brighter and cheaper smart bulbs can be found on amazon.

Given that so many of these bulbs do not require a hub and are essentially plug and play, what's the benefit of paying the premium for the hub? I could do exactly the same thing with my Echo with the hub built in, no?

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Given that so many of these bulbs do not require a hub and are essentially plug and play, what's the benefit of paying the premium for the hub? I could do exactly the same thing with my Echo with the hub built in, no?

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i dont think echo has a hub built in but the new eero mesh node product from amazon does have zigbee radio so there's potential there..

this is why

(osram = sylvania's entry into the smart hub business)

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03/09/2020 | Trade Press

Osram has decided to shut down server support for smart lamps from the Lightify lighting system within 18 months. More and more customers prefer comprehensive Smart Home solutions with intelligent assistants and are no longer controlling their lighting via a separate lighting control system or gateway. Osram, as the supplier of the Lightify platform, and Ledvance, as the exclusive distributor of the Lightify gateway, have taken heed of this trend. Osram will therefore be shutting down the cloud server for controlling the Lightify gateway on August 31, 2021. Ledvance finished selling the gateway at the start of 2019. Smart+ products from Ledvance, some of which are still sold under the brand name of Osram, are compatible with a large number of major Smart Home platforms and are optimized for control with intelligent assistants. As a result, they will continue to work with these platforms. More information will be made available by Ledvance.

Lightify customers were informed today in a newsletter and will also be notified separately directly in the app. Customers have one and a half years to switch to an alternative smart-home platform where they can continue to use their smart lamps and luminaires under the ZigBee standard. Only local functions will be possible from August 31, 2021.

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Luckily these bulbs are zigbee so you can pair them with a HUE hub or something else but if they were WiFi you would be shite-out-of-luck.

Now imagine future support for that inexpensive chinese wifi bulb you got from amazon with an app that is in broken english.

much like with wink; you need to be careful about buying things that depend on a cloud that may or may not change or even turn into a pay model at some point.