Tiny Ikea tech, big value
T3 highlighted Ikea gadgets that look pricier than they are — one example: an Ikea smart light compared to a Philips Hue model but selling for about £4, which is a small‑cost way to kit out a place quickly. (t3.com)
IKEA’s cheapest tech picks now start at £3, and one of the standouts is a new SKAFTSÄRVLED decoration light that looks like Philips Hue’s Play Light Bar but sells for £4 in the United Kingdom and $6.99 in the United States. That £4 lamp is not a full Philips Hue rival. IKEA’s own listing says the company’s newer smart-home push is built around Matter, while the SKAFTSÄRVLED article says this light is not one of those newer Matter-compatible devices. What you get instead is the cheap part people usually want first: color. The SKAFTSÄRVLED offers dimming, seven colors, rainbow-style effects, and can sit upright or flat, which makes it more like a mood light you can drop behind a monitor or on a shelf than a whole-house lighting system. The price gap is the whole story here. T3’s comparison put the Philips Hue Play Light Bar at about £60, so IKEA is selling a similar-looking ambient light for roughly one-fifteenth of that price. IKEA has been moving its smart-home lineup in two directions at once. One lane is ultra-cheap one-off gadgets like this £4 light, and the other is a broader rebuild around Matter, the common smart-home standard meant to make devices from different brands work together. That rebuild is not small. IKEA said in November 2025 that it was launching 21 new smart-home products across lighting, sensors, and controls, all built to work with Matter, and said the goal was to make smart-home gear easier to use and more affordable. The company is also swapping out some of its older names. IKEA’s United Kingdom smart-home page says TRÅDFRI products are gradually being replaced by KAJPLATS, while keeping both lines compatible with the IKEA Home smart app. That matters because smart lighting usually gets expensive at the edges. CNET found IKEA undercutting Philips Hue not just on bulbs but on accessories too, with an IKEA STYRBAR remote at $14 versus a Philips Hue Tap Switch Mini at $50, and an IKEA VALLHORN motion sensor at $9 versus a Philips Hue Motion Sensor at $45. The trade-off is features. CNET notes Philips Hue still has the larger selection, and the SKAFTSÄRVLED specifically does not offer Hue’s entertainment syncing for movies, games, or music. So the IKEA pitch is getting very clear in 2026: buy the polished-looking lamp, speaker, charger, or remote for the price of a takeaway, and only pay for the full smart-home plumbing if you actually want it. That is how a flat-pack furniture chain ends up selling tech that looks premium while starting at £3.
