Apple smart home hub finally has a date, and I want logs before I want a screen
Apple wants a spot on your kitchen counter. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the company will hold a home-focused event later in October, and the star is a display-equipped hub that recognizes whoever walks up to it. A refreshed HomePod mini and a new Apple TV tag along. All of it doubles as a stage for the rebuilt Siri, and it’s the first big category bet under new CEO John Ternus.
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I’m glad… also wary. Apple has spent the better part of a decade asking you to build a smart home around its software while treating the home like a weekend hobby, and a gorgeous screen on a polished metal arm won’t change my mind unless the unglamorous plumbing underneath gets fixed too.
The hub’s best trick is knowing who you are
Gurman says the hub, code-named J490, is due Oct. 13 with a 6-inch square display. Walk up to it, and it can pull up your calendar and messages in the app layout you chose. Your partner can walk over next and get their own setup without reaching for a phone. If friends are around, a guest mode keeps your personal information off the screen.
That one feature goes straight at the weakest corner of Apple Home. One person owns the home today, and everyone else gets treated as a lodger. A device built around a household of separate people is the smartest idea in the whole report, and it’s the part that would get my money.
Voice recognition handles one route, while the camera handles another. Gurman reports that face recognition isn’t as dependable as Face ID, so Apple has another trick for dark rooms: a virtual white ring around the display. Your iPhone can help when the hub gets it wrong. With Theia walking into rooms at random, I’d probably see that ring quite a bit.
An iMac G4 for the countertop
Going by Gurman’s description, the standard model looks like a shrunken iMac G4, a round metal base pierced with speaker holes holding up the display on a polished arm you tilt by hand. No battery. No power button, and no volume keys either.
A touch-only volume control is already something I’d hesitate over near a sink. Add wet fingers, and I can see myself reaching for my phone instead. J491 moves the hub onto a wall with a thin square base underneath, but there’s still a USB-C cable to deal with. I’d want that tucked away.
Apple still treats the smart home as a side project
Apple gave the HomePod a shot in 2018, but the speaker struggled to break through. The cheaper mini fared better, although it never became a runaway seller. The company later tied its new home hub to a Siri overhaul planned for 2024. When Siri slipped, the hub slipped with it.
Amazon and Google kept shipping smart-home hardware while Apple stayed on the sidelines. Meanwhile, anyone who’s had a HomeKit device return “No Response” knows the less glamorous side of Apple’s smart-home pitch. A new display doesn’t solve that by itself.
What I’d like to see is the boring stuff. A proper activity history. Clear records of automation changes. Some way to find the rule that stopped working instead of digging through a long list. Anyone who’s built up a decent number of automations knows how quickly that page gets ugly.
Gurman does say Apple is expanding HomeKit with new device categories and working with outside manufacturers on gear for the Siri AI platform. Good. His report says nothing about whether the hub gets an App Store, and nothing about Thread or Matter. Both gaps worry me more than screen size ever could.
Faster insides for the HomePod mini and Apple TV
The HomePod mini gets its first update since its 2020 debut, in green and pink. Code found in Apple’s own software reportedly points to the S11 chip from the Apple Watch Series 12 inside. Same shape. The Apple TV, its first since 2022, keeps its old look too and picks up a faster processor for Siri.
I’m not excited about either one. They’re Siri delivery trucks.
Still in the lab
Gurman also describes a privacy-focused security sensor, J450, that can tell which room you’re in without recording video, plus a 9-inch hub on a robotic arm that swivels 360 degrees. Neither is due on Oct. 13. Siri’s new brain runs on large language models built with Google’s help. A few years ago I’d have laughed at that sentence, and Apple declined to comment on any of it.
