It took Tim Cook years for Apple to launch into major new hardware categories like smartwatches. But John Ternes may begin his tenure immediately with an ambitious new project: smart home hardware.
All signs potentially point to a strong lineup of new smart home devices coming this fall, bringing Apple back into the game in a category that has been notoriously slow to ship new devices.
With a hardware guy at the helm in Turnus, Apple’s chances of fully committing to the smart home feel even greater than Cook did. And whereas, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Turnus was reluctant to invest deeply in smart home a decade ago—taking “some responsibility” for Apple’s lagging in the category—today he is reportedly “leading the charge on a trio of home products.”
Apple has ceded ground to competitors in smart home hardware for years. Amazon and Google have launched more than 40 smart speakers and smart displays in the last decade, compared to Apple’s three. However, in that time, Apple has built a privacy-focused, locally controlled platform for third-party devices. Take-up from manufacturers was slow initially, but Apple’s investment in Matter has fueled significant growth over the past few years. Yet there’s still a shortage of Apple Home hardware. If the rumors are true, all this is about to change.
First, there’s the “HomePad,” rumored to be a roughly 7-inch-square touchscreen smart display that includes facial recognition, FaceTime, presence sensing, and control of smart home devices like lights, locks, and cameras. It is reported to have two form factors, a wall-mounted version that can snap onto a MagSafe mount and one with a HomePod Mini-style speaker base. A tool like this could help unlock one of the struggles in the smart home – shared control. Everyone in the home can control it, and the home can react equally to everyone in it, rather than being controlled by one person and their phone.
Ternus was reluctant to invest deeply in smart home a decade ago
Then there are rumors of a dedicated Apple Home smart home device, which includes home security cameras, a video doorbell, and a standalone sensor. Featuring facial recognition and presence sensors, the cameras can feed into Apple Home and a smart Siri to provide context about who is home, when and where. This will be a key element in unlocking the benefits of AI in the smart home, which aims to create more ambient experiences than today’s command-and-control interfaces.
Privacy-focused cameras are the only way people will be comfortable with this kind of visual awareness, and Apple already has a solution. Cameras connected to its HomeKit Secure Video service can be set to detect activity without allowing video streaming or recording.
Physical sensors will also play a role; The new HomePods are UWB-equipped, and rumor has it that the Apple Home sensor could feed into a home security system and be key to whole-home orchestration.
Then there’s the long-rumored Home Robot, a tabletop device with a display mounted on a robotic arm. As well as being a home appliance, this product also fits into the broader AI story. Based on a paper published last year, Apple could create a kind of physical AI by imbuing it with a personality that provides companionship as well as utility. This change is something we’ll definitely see more of in the smart home, and Apple may be taking the lead here.
On the software side, there is a real need for integration and focus on in-home AI use cases. A new HomeOS that merges tvOS and HomePod software is long overdue, and it could be the foundation for an AI-powered brain to run your smart home. It could be revealed at WWDC this June, setting the stage for a renaissance of the Apple Home. Other relevant rumors include a new chip coming to the HomePod mini 2 and a next-generation Apple TV, which could bring full support for new voice assistant features, as well as – crucially – the ability to process most commands locally.
Apple’s failure to innovate in smart home hardware may be due to its low priority within the company. But now, many forces are coming together. Matter, the smart home standard that Apple helped develop, is finally bringing real interoperability to the platform. The cancellation of the Apple Car project reportedly freed up significant engineering resources for the Apple Home. And AI is set to reshape the functionality of smart homes.
Of course, Siri is the obvious catch here. The long-overdue generative AI improvements, which should bring a smarter, more context-aware assistant to the home, could be the glue that holds the hardware together. But it seems that Apple is fully prepared to solve this problem. Amazon’s Alexa Plus and Google’s Gemini for Home have shown the potential of LLM-powered smart-home voice assistants, even if the reality is still pretty messy. When a smarter Siri arrives, expectations are high that Apple will follow its traditional playbook — entering late but gracefully.
For Ternus, the challenge of the smart home now lies in the implementation. With the pieces in place, Apple’s smart home could go from side project to main priority in Cupertino. The question is, will the new CEO be able to assemble them? And if he can turn Apple’s internal quest for perfection that has characterized the Cook era into a campaign that could bring this potentially game-changing product category to fruition. For a company that has spent a decade building a foundation, it’s finally time to move on.
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