Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsEVEN BETTER THAN THAT OTHER PH BRAND
Reviewed in Canada on June 18, 2021
Wow! As someone who has bought-in to the entire Apple infrastructure, I gotta say… These are the very best smart bulbs to integrate seamlessly into that structure. And I have to admit, they are even better than those original smart bulbs by PH which first aligned with Apple.
Unfortunately, I had fallen hard for those PH bulbs a few years back. They were not only hyper-expensive and very complicated to set up, but almost immediately I started having issues with that brand. Fully half of those PH bulbs I had bought no longer function properly at all now — constantly dropping out, flashing on and off randomly, flickering and refusing to remain off when powered off. And no amount of troubleshooting (I’m a techie) has corrected those issues. I will never return to the PH universe ever again — not now after discovering Meross products.
The thing I truly appreciate the most with these Meross HomeKit enabled bulbs, aside from their amazingly low price compared to PH and their incredible friendliness with Apple, is the fact that their app is so intuitively simple, uncluttered and uncomplicated — yet very highly reliable and effective — pretty much mimicking Apple’s philosophy with that whole “KISS” acronym… Keep It Simple Stupid”.
They have, indeed, kept it simple, by pure virtue of… 1) the extremely easy setup of any of their devices. I’m using over a dozen plugs and now multiple bulbs as well… 2) all of their devices are about as close to “plug-and-play” as it can get without actually being plug-and-play (at least not yet anyways)… 3) absolutely incredible connectivity strength and dependability with instantaneous responsiveness, but make sure you’re using only a 2.4g connection… 4) it’s total integration with both Apple HomeKit/Siri and Amazon Echo/Alexa (I use both throughout the house) is truly remarkable, so I can only assume Google and other integrations might be the same… 5) their discoverability and intercommunicative ability with so many other smart home apps, like Eve, for example, when using ifTTT automation correlating with home atmospheric conditions.
In short, these bulbs are just outstanding. One thing I will leave you with, though, is this… Contrary to what Meross states in their user’s instructions, DO NOT set them up in the HomeKit app first. That process is actually quite buggy. Set them up in the Meross app first AND do a firmware update. It’s a far easier and much more do-able process. Then once that’s done, your HomeKit, once launched, will already populate itself with them automatically. But that’s just for their initial set up. All other settings and tweaks can be done easily with HomeKit after that.