When The Verge’s senior smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, offered to give us a tour of her smart backyard, I was thrilled. Firstly, I have never seen a technologically advanced backyard curated by an industry expert before, and secondly, I wasn’t even sure what to expect. My vision of a smart home includes automated vacuums, a smart thermostat, and maybe one of those AI fridges that suggests recipes – all of which work within controlled environments and are built around making life inside more comfortable. So I found myself repeatedly asking, “How exactly do smart devices make something as unyielding as outside, comfortable?”
I …