Skip to main content

Nest Lab debuts world’s first learning thermostat

Nest Labs Founders
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Two Apple vets want to take control of your home heating and cooling. Tony Faddel (known as the “godfather” of the iPod) and former iPhone software manager Matt Rogers have announced the Nest Learning Thermostat, the first product from their startup Nest Labs. The idea behind the Nest thermostat is simple: instead of blindly following a rote schedule and trying to maintain arbitrary settings, the Next incorporates learning behaviors through a series of sensors, algorithms, and—yes—cloud computing. The Nest thermostat adjusts its behavior dynamically to make sure users are comfortable when they’re at home while at the same time saving energy while they’re away—even if that time away wasn’t part of the thermostat’s programming.

“It was unacceptable to me that the device that controls 10 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. hadn’t kept up with advancements in technology and design,” said Tony Fadell, Nest Labs co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “[We] set out to reinvent the thermostat using advanced technologies, high-quality manufacturing processes and the thoughtful design elements the iPhone generation has come to expect.”

Nest Learning Thermostat
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The key behavior of the Nest home thermostat is that it programs itself. Users just set base temperatures, and Nest pays attention to users’ schedules during its first week after installation, and will starting automatically reducing heating and cooling when users are away from home. Over time, the Nest will develop a more-refined sense of users’ schedule and be able to adjust its behavior very finely—for instance, about two hours after users have left the house, Nest will sense they’ve gone and will adjust heading and cooling to save energy. Nest does this with a combination of temperature sensors, a 150° activity sensor to detect nearby movement, and even includes ambient light sensors to keep its display from blinding you if you walk up to it in the middle of the night.

Users adjust the Nest with a simple dial: turning it up for heating, turning it down for cooling: the Nest turns orange when it’s heating and blue when it’s cooling. To encourage users to save energy, Nest will eventually start displaying green “Nest Leaf” icons when users set temperatures that represent the most energy-efficient settings. One-off changes to the thermostat settings won’t confuse the Nest, but if a user (say) turns down the thermostat on Friday afternoons two weeks in a row, Nest will remember that next week.

But that’s not all there is to the Nest thermostat. The Nest thermostat connects to a user’s home Internet connection via Wi-Fi, which means users can log in to an account at Nest.com to control their home temperature via the Internet from their computer, smartphone, or other mobile device. (This includes managing multiple Nest thermostats per household.) The Nest will also automatically receive software updates via the Internet—no configuration required. The thermostat also grabs weather information via the Internet, so it can adjust its behavior to outside conditions.

The Nest thermostat will be available in mid-November for a suggested retail price of $249; pre-orders are available now. Most installation materials come in the box for do-it-yourselfers (basically, the same as installing a lighting fixture), or customers can bundle installation service in with their order.

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more