HomeKit Camera Longevity: Nine Years, Six Cameras, Three Failures

By Matthew Easterday · Published Aug 3, 2026 · Updated Aug 3, 2026 · ✅ First-hand tested

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Every HomeKit camera bought for this house since 2017 has a dated order behind it. Putting them in one table shows something no individual review would.

What was bought and what happened

Six camera units, four products, three dead.

The two Circle 2 cameras ran at the same time rather than one replacing the other, with the second mounted to a front window. Both failed. The Omna is covered separately in its own review; the short version is that it ran uncomfortably hot for its whole life and then stopped responding, with no diagnosis available.

Now compare the rest of the house

Everything below ran on the same network over the same years.

One failure out of five, against three out of six for cameras. The iDevices plugs are the sharpest contrast: nine years of daily use, firmware frozen at 1.9.11, from a brand that was acquired and went quiet, and they still work every day. The iHome sensor has reported five sensor values continuously since January 2018.

What I think is going on, and what I don’t

A camera does more work than anything else in a smart home. Continuous video encoding, a radio pushing that video out, an image sensor, infrared emitters at night, all running around the clock inside a small sealed plastic housing with no fan. A smart plug closes a relay and then idles for years.

That fits the three failures, which all ran on mains power and never slept.

It does not explain everything, and I want to be careful here rather than tidy. The eufy plug-in camera is mains-powered too and it has been fine. The two failed brands, Logitech and D-Link, both stopped making HomeKit cameras not long after; the surviving brand still sells them. Era and build quality plausibly matter more than the power source on its own.

Six cameras in one household is not a study. Treat it as one person’s dated experience rather than a failure rate you can generalise.

The part that actually costs you

A dead smart plug is an inconvenience. You lose a scheduled light and you buy another plug.

A dead camera removes coverage. The clips already in iCloud stay there, but the view stops existing, and you often find out days later when you go looking for footage that was never recorded. That asymmetry is the reason camera reliability deserves more weight in a buying decision than its spec sheet suggests.

If you’re running HomeKit Secure Video, the camera is the only part of that chain you can’t easily swap. The hub and the iCloud+ plan carry on regardless.

How I’d buy now

Budget for replacement. Two to three years is the horizon I plan around for a camera, and anything beyond that is a bonus rather than an expectation. That changes which price bracket makes sense, because a cheaper camera you replace twice may be a better outcome than an expensive one that fails at the same age.

Prefer a brand with a record you can check, ideally your own. The only camera brand in this house with nothing failed against it is eufy, so that’s where I’d start, and I’ve said as much in the Omna review.

Check what a failure costs you before it happens. Which view goes dark, whether an automation depends on that camera’s motion events, and how quickly you would even notice.

What’s next here

The eufy cameras need charging and plugging back in, at which point they get a proper review with a rating. Until then this page is what I can honestly say about cameras: I’ve bought six, three died, and the survivors all came from the same maker.