On this week's episode of the Smart Home Insider podcast, Z-Wave Alliance char Avi Rosenthal joins us to talk about the U.S. robovac ban, Apple's smart home launch plans, and why Z-Wave is still worth using in a current smart home.

As the chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance board, plus years of industry knowledge, Avi Rosenthal is a great resource for this week's topics.

We start the episode, as we almost always do, with the week's news, before getting into a detailed discussion on Z-Wave and the future.

Kicking off the news, the U.S. has banned new foreign-made robotics from entering the country. This includes robotic vacuums, as well as home power inverters.

Avi has a lot of insight here, for example, why the ban specifically cites 4.4 pounds as the threshold for banned robotics. Banned devices also must be ground-bound and have some sort of environmental sensor or camera.

This new ban won't impact devices on sale right now, but will block new ones without an exception waiver. Currently, this will apply to almost all major smart home vacuum brands, such as Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, iRobot, Eufy, SwitchBot, and more.

In the last week, we also saw Homey bring support for Matter 1.5. SwitchBot released the Wi-Fi-enabled countertop Circulator Fan 2 Pro.

Wrapping up the news, Bloomberg reported that Apple is indeed gearing up for its big smart home launch by the end of 2026. As has been rumored for a long time, Apple is said to be launching a new HomePod mini, Apple TV, and a smart display in the coming months, equipped with Siri AI.

Shifting gears, we hop into some talk on Z-Wave. This legacy connectivity standard has persisted through the years alongside the rise and fall of others.

Avi Rosenthal serves on the board, but is also an industry consultant with decades of consumer electronics knowledge.

Some of our topics include how Z-Wave is still differentiating itself, how it can work alongside Matter and Thread, and what the biggest misconceptions about the technology are.

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