TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Today, Nest announced their first new product since the Nest thermostat—Nest Protect. Nest Protect is a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm.

For an excellent look at Nest Protect, and profile of why they made it and the design process, you should read Stephen Levy’s piece for Wired.

…Wait, what? A smoke alarm?

Yes. Nest’s latest product is a $130 smoke alarm.

Nest’s basic strategy should be obvious now: take things we use in our daily lives but don’t at all enjoy using, or actively abhor using, and think through them so that they’re both better devices and delightful to own and use. (It’s also worth noting that they’re choosing product categories that are very large and universally needed.)

It’s more than that, though. The Nest thermostat and Nest Protect are standalone devices, but they work together. If you have a Nest thermostat and smoke alarms installed in your home, the smoke alarms will inform the thermostat when there’s movement in the home—which should make the Nest thermostat’s “Auto-Away” feature much more accurate, and thus able to be that much more efficient with a home’s energy use.

But what’s even more illuminating for what Nest’s vision is, though, is that if a Nest smoke alarm senses carbon monoxide, it will tell the thermostat to turn off the home’s furnace, which is a likely cause of carbon monoxide poisoning.

That’s truly smart. Nest has not only built two devices that work together to efficiently manage your home’s energy and protect you from fire, but they’ve created two devices that can actively judge the situation and work together to intervene in your home to keep you safe.

We’ve been hearing about the “smart home” for a very long time now, but this is the first time we’re legitimately there. Tony Fadell seemed to confirm this as Nest’s intent while talking with Stephen Levy:

In other words, Nest isn’t only about beautifying the thermostat or adding features to the lowly smoke detector. “We’re about creating the conscious home,” Fadell says. “To take a truly important device that has had no great innovation and make that device really, really great.” Left unsaid is a grander vision, with even bigger implications: many devices sensing the environment, talking to one another, and doing our bidding unprompted.

That’s a grand dream, and I think the Nest Protect—ostensibly just a smoke alarm—is going to be a key cog within their plan. Think about it: it’s not just a smoke alarm, but an Internet-connected computer with sophisticated sensors and software in every bedroom and on every floor. It knows when you wake up (since it has a motion-tracking sensor), when you go to bed, and even when you get up in the middle of the night. Along with the Nest thermostat, they also know when you leave for the day and when you get home. There’s a lot of immediate information there to begin doing some incredible things, and it’s something that could serve as a platform for all kinds of other services as well.

So yes, it is “just” a smoke alarm. And a very good one. But I think it’s also a piece of a much larger plan: make products that are so good that they can stand on their own and you’ll have to have them, but also work together to create something we’ve never seen before.