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Sonos Era 300

The Sonos Era 300 is a premium spatial audio speaker built around six drivers arranged to fire forward, sideways, and upward, producing convincing Dolby Atmos playback from a single cabinet. It is one of the few standalone speakers that takes spatial audio seriously rather than treating it as a checkbox feature, and the build quality reflects its price: a dense, rigid enclosure, capacitive controls that have held up well in long-term use, and a hardware microphone switch that physically disconnects the voice assistant mics.

Philips Hue

Philips Hue is the longest-running mainstream smart lighting ecosystem, sold since 2012 and made by Signify, the lighting company spun off from Philips. This listing covers the ecosystem as a whole: the Zigbee-based bulbs, light strips, lamps, and fixtures, plus the Hue Bridge that coordinates them. The Bridge connects to your router over Ethernet, stores and runs automations locally, and exposes a fully documented local REST API that has been a fixture of the smart home hobbyist world for more than a decade.

ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium

The ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is the flagship of one of the two thermostat makers that have actually stayed the course in smart climate control. The Premium model wraps a responsive touchscreen in a zinc-and-glass housing, adds a built-in air quality sensor for VOCs and estimated CO2, includes a remote SmartSensor for occupancy and temperature in a second room, and doubles as a small smart speaker with Siri or Alexa onboard. It is a thermostat first, though, and the core job, running your HVAC reliably on a schedule, works whether or not the internet does.