Hands-on with Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat

This week, almost a decade after Google last updated its flagship thermostat, the company has announced the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen). The thermostat has an all-new design, several new features, and support for the smart home standard Matter. So, yes, it now works natively with Apple Home.

At $279.99, the fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat is more expensive than the third-gen Nest, which launched in 2015. However, it now comes with a new Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen) to monitor temperature in other rooms. Both are available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th — in the US and Canada only. 

I’m a big proponent of smart home devices that are built to last — no one wants to upgrade their thermostat every couple of years. But it’s been nine years since we had a new Nest Learning Thermostat (the Nest Thermostat that arrived in 2020 stripped away most of the intelligence features), and technology is progressing more rapidly than in the days of the beige plastic boxes on your wall. 

Surprisingly, Google didn’t follow competitor Ecobee by packing more function into its flagship thermostat. This isn’t a smart speaker, a smart display, or a smart home hub. Instead, the focus is on making this a really smart thermostat.

Google says the new model uses AI to learn your heating and cooling schedule faster and more accurately — alongside other upgrades to help manage your system more efficiently.

Google added its Soli radar sensor to the device to provide more accurate inputs about your presence, plus support for Matter, the new smart home standard. This means that, among other benefits, the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) can now work natively in Apple Home. (The Nest Thermostat from 2020 already works with Matter.)

However, Matter support is over Wi-Fi — there’s no Thread radio — surprising, considering the original Nest is the reason Thread was developed.

But as Google Home’s head of product, Anish Kattukaran, tells me, Google wants users to have other devices in their homes to act as Thread hubs — such as the new Google TV Streamer 4K — which is a Google Home hub, Matter controller, and Thread border router. The Nest Thermostat is meant to focus on its main job: keeping you comfortable while saving you energy. 

I saw the new Nest Thermostat in person at Google’s New York headquarters last week, and it’s very striking. It’s much bigger — the 2.7-inch screen is more than double the size of the previous generation — but also slimmer. It looks like someone flattened the third-gen Nest while borrowing a lot of design cues from the Pixel Watch, including the same curved glass screen and customizable watch-like faces.

It comes in three brushed metal designs: black, silver, and gold. I liked the gold best, although it’s more subtle in person than in the press shots. 

The physical rotating dial remains but is now smoother and easier to control. It still has those satisfying clicks, but its larger size makes better precision selections possible on the screen.

There’s no visible bezel, and the larger screen takes advantage of a fun new Dynamic Farsight feature that brings neat weather animations to the screen along with more customizability. You can choose the main face to be your indoor temperatures, an analog clock, a digital clock, or the weather, and as you approach, you’ll get more detailed information.

That detail now includes three extra fields, similar to watchface complications. Each can be set to show information such as humidity, outdoor temperature, time, and date. Plus there’s now the option of an outdoor air quality index score — useful in areas prone to seasonal issues like wildfire smoke.

On the learning front, Google is addressing a long-term annoyance of the smart thermostat: its propensity to have a mind of its own and crank up the heat on a sunny afternoon for no obvious reason (speaking from experience).

There’s now the option to have the thermostat suggest changes for you to accept rather than initiating them automatically. It will also tell you what it’s doing if you press on the screen. “We wanted to take the black box approach out of it. It’s an incredibly intelligent device, but that shouldn’t mean you don’t know what’s going on,” says Kattukaran.

That intelligence extends to new energy-saving features. Natural Heating and Cooling reacts to outdoor temperatures and learns how your house naturally adjusts to save energy. For example, “If it’s a sunny winter day and your home heats up a few degrees on its own, the thermostat will automatically pause heating to save energy,” says Kattukaran.

Adaptive Eco is an update to Eco Mode that adjusts based on climate. It won’t drop too low on a cold day when you’re gone, avoiding having to work overtime to ramp back up when you return, says Kattukaran. A new Smart Ventilation option for compatible hardware optimizes when to ventilate based on outdoor air quality.

Upgrades to the HVAC Monitoring feature, now called the System Health Monitor, track your system’s performance and send alerts about any issues. A Humidity Helper aims to keep humidity levels stable to prevent condensation and mold. Google says these new features are exclusive to the newest model at launch.

Kattukaran says the fourth-gen Nest is their most compatible thermostat yet and works with more systems, including humidifier, dehumidifier, and ventilation equipment. It now supports 12 wire hookups compared to 10 on the third-gen Nest and continues to work without a C-wire in most setups.

The other new hardware is the Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen), one of which comes with the thermostat. The sensor is essentially the same as the first-gen model, with a new look to resemble the new thermostat. In both cases, its primary job is still to feed the temperature in other rooms to the thermostat.

Unfortunately, the sensor still only monitors temperature and not occupancy, like the competing sensor from Ecobee. One upgrade is that multiple sensors can now average the temperature across several rooms.

Google says you can add up to six and choose which are active at different times by linking them to your schedules in the Google Home app. This lets you have the thermostat respond to the temperature in the kitchen and living room in the morning and then to your bedroom at night.

The new Nest brings significant upgrades to an already excellent device. While some features are playing catch-up with the competition (Ecobee already uses outdoor weather to balance climate and radar sensors for occupancy), it’s good to see them finally arrive. In terms of design, it feels like a winner — this is a gorgeous piece of wall art.

The Nest Learning Thermostat costs $279.99, and the Nest Temperature Sensor is $39.99 ($99.99 for three). They’re available for preorder now at store.google.com and select retailers and will ship on August 20th.