There are two types of people who should buy a Home Hub: people who have a maxed-out smart home, and people who don't own a single smart home device yet.
My reasoning with the former category is simple: the idea of the Home Hub is that it takes the hardest thing about setting up and maintaining a smart home — the endless amount of individual apps you need to control everything — and puts it one, easy-to-use location. Being able to watch a live feed from your security camera, or tapping the screen to control the lights, would be a game-changer.
On the other end of the spectrum are people embarking on their first smart home product, or their first device with a smart assistant built-in. The Home Hub is great for that, too, because it acts as a jumping-off point. You can start with the hub, then add other devices as you go. And if you learn how to use a smart speaker on the Home Hub, adding a Google Home Mini or Home Max down the line will be that much easier.
I fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and because of that, the Home Hub felt like a bit like an extravagance. I felt like I was only able to use 50% of its capacity, and a lot of its potential use cases were wasted on me.
But I can't deny that the Home Hub made me happy on a daily basis, thanks to the Google Photos ambient mode; the on-screen weather, calendar, and traffic; and the additional nifty features, like the auto-dimming display. I even noticed that when I had a reservation at an Italian restaurant, Google Assistant adopted an Italian accent to tell me the details.
For all that, $150 doesn't seem like too big a price to pay.
Note: All of the photos in this review were shot with the Google Pixel 3.