There's a version of the smart home that looks great in a YouTube tour and is a nightmare to actually live with — finicky hubs, incompatible apps, voice commands that work 70% of the time. And then there's a $100 donut-shaped lamp from IKEA that a 15-year-old called "nice." That's a meaningful data point.
IKEA's new Varmblixt smart lamp, reviewed this week by The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, is a small product with a surprisingly coherent argument about what smart home gear should actually be.
The Smart Home Tax Is Usually Too High
Most smart lighting asks a lot of you upfront. You buy the bulbs, download the app, create an account, pair the hub, name the rooms, set the schedules — and somewhere in that process, at least one thing doesn't work and you spend 40 minutes on a support forum. The payoff, for most people, is being able to say "Hey, turn off the lights" instead of walking three feet to a switch.
The Varmblixt sidesteps most of that friction. It ships with a pre-paired physical remote — two buttons, no app required — that handles on/off, dimming, and cycling through 12 preset colors. You plug it in and it works. That's not a small thing. The included remote means the lamp is genuinely useful on day one, before you've touched a hub or downloaded anything.
The design earns its keep too. The lamp's distinctive bulbous shape — it's been nicknamed the donut lamp — comes in a matte finish on the smart version, which Tuohy notes looks more stylish than the glossy original and better shows off the color range. It can sit flat on a table or mount to a wall, and the long power cable gives you real placement flexibility. At 180 lumens, it's not a reading lamp. It's an accent light, a mood setter, a thing that makes a corner of a room feel considered rather than accidental.
Where It Gets More Interesting (and More Complicated)
Here's where the smart home tax reappears, in smaller print. The 12 preset colors from the remote are the curated selection of the lamp's designer, artist Sabine Marcelis — shades of white, blue, green, pink, orange, and yellow. If you want the full color range, adaptive lighting, or integration with automations, you need either an IKEA hub or a Matter-compatible hub, and you'll be working through the IKEA Home Smart app or Apple Home.
That's a reasonable ask for anyone already in one of those ecosystems. Matter-over-Thread support means the Varmblixt plays well with a growing number of smart home platforms without being locked to IKEA's own infrastructure — a genuine win for interoperability that most smart home products still don't offer cleanly. But if you're starting from scratch with no hub and no ecosystem, the $100 lamp becomes a $100 lamp plus whatever hub costs plus setup time.
Tuohy also flags that the remote's connectivity is sometimes spotty, and that the lamp looks a bit odd when it's off — the matte donut shape reads differently unlit than it does glowing. Minor complaints, but worth knowing.
The Honest Case for Buying This
At $100, the Varmblixt is priced like a considered purchase, not an impulse buy. But if you've spent any time shopping accent lighting — a decent Philips Hue lamp, a color-capable bedside light from any established brand — you know that $100 is a reasonable price for what this delivers. You're getting a distinctive design, genuine color flexibility, Matter support for future-proofing, and a physical remote that means the lamp never depends on your phone being charged or your Wi-Fi being cooperative.
The pattern I keep watching in smart home gear is whether products treat the physical controls as a fallback or as a first-class feature. The Varmblixt treats the remote as the primary interface and the app as the upgrade path. That's the right instinct. It's how you build something that works for the person who doesn't want to think about it and the person who wants to build automations.
The 15-year-old verdict — "It's nice" — is underselling it, but only slightly.
Verdict: Buy, if you want an accent lamp and you're in an IKEA or Apple Home ecosystem. Wait, if you have no hub and no plans to build one — the remote-only experience is good, but you're leaving half the product on the table.
What I'm Watching Next
Apple's smart glasses are taking shape, with Bloomberg reporting on multiple frame styles and a distinctive oval camera design — worth tracking as the Meta Ray-Ban comparison becomes more concrete. Qualcomm's new chips promising all-day battery life are reportedly being adopted across multiple brands in 2026, per Engadget — the real test will be whether that promise holds in daily use. And robot lawn mowers are apparently a real product category now; PCMag has a full roundup, which means enough people are buying them to warrant serious coverage.