This week, Apple is hosting its first event dedicated to smart homes. While the company hasn’t shared details about what it will reveal at the “Welcome Home experience” in New York City on Tuesday, October 13, it doesn’t take an army of Internet sleuths to deduce that we’ll be getting news about Apple Home — specifically, new hardware. Apple finally seems to be getting serious about the smart home.
According to Bloomberg, Apple will launch a smart home display alongside a revamped HomePod Mini and Apple TV. The display, which MacRumors says may be called HomeView, is possibly Apple’s first dedicated Apple Home hardware since it launched the HomeKit platform in 2014. As exciting as it is (and I’ll be there in person to check it out), the real game-changer will be bringing Siri AI and Apple Intelligence into the home. Apple is years behind Google and Amazon in smart home hardware, but success in the home depends much more on software. That’s where Apple could surpass the competition.
New home hardware is long overdue. Apple announced the HomePod Mini on October 13, 2020, six years after this week’s event, and the newest Apple TV 4K is now four years old. And those aren’t dedicated smart home devices; They are more content consumption devices with a home automation side. The new smart display is reportedly designed to be the heart of Apple Home, marking a complete reboot of the ecosystem, and Apple Home users have wanted it for years.
The smart display category has a checkered history. Amazon and Google have released several generations of these touch-screen, voice-controlled smart speakers that can control smart home devices like lights and locks, trigger doorbell camera feeds, and make video calls. But the category has seen very little innovation and its best use case has been to serve as a digital photo frame.
According to the leaks, Apple’s product doesn’t sound all that different from what came before. According BloombergIt will have a 6-inch square display on a speaker stand or as a wall-mounted option, facial recognition to display your personal messages and calendar, a minimalist touchscreen interface to control locks and thermostats, and FaceTime and intercom calling. Nothing groundbreaking except the rumored price: $350, ouch! The difference has to be in the software and the smart assistant that powers it.
Bloomberg reports that the smart display will launch with a new operating system based on Siri AI. Generative AI has breathed new life into the smart home voice assistant by facilitating conversation and expanding its capabilities. Until now, Apple’s new Siri AI has been missing from its HomePods and Apple TV; when you talk to them, the old Siri responds in a basic and functional way.
Apple is the latest of the big three to bring generative AI to its home assistant. Amazon and Google launched theirs last year, but Alexa Plus is just starting to get it right, and Google’s Gemini for Home, an underpowered version of Gemini, is a confusing mess of capabilities. Now it’s Apple’s turn, and if the company can successfully merge its super-powerful personal assistant on your iPhone with a super-powerful assistant for your home, it may have a hit on its hands.
That’s a big if. So far, every company has hit major roadblocks to bringing a smarter assistant into the home. Apple announced Apple Intelligence in 2024, but Siri AI arrived last month; a version of Alexa Plus was announced in 2023, but not released until 2025; Gemini for the home is still in an early access program and divided into a strange hybrid model where its most capable version, Gemini Live, cannot interact with the home.
These cautious approaches are due to the fact that the home is a large, complicated, messy, multi-user environment that is difficult to control. An AI agent doing something wrong could have far greater consequences than accidentally sending an email. Smart home systems are connected to critical infrastructure such as HVAC, locks, and security systems. Every home is different and has unique needs – there is no single plug-and-play solution.
Progress has been made to solve one of the biggest smart home challenges: interoperability, with open standards like Matter and Thread promising to make setting up and using a smart home easier. But these are protocols, not software. It is the platforms that have to make the smart home work. This is where Apple may have the advantage.
Four years ago, after helping found Matter, Apple rebuilt the underlying architecture of HomeKit and revamped the Home app, laying a solid foundation. That move also allowed Apple Home to work with more devices from more manufacturers (previously, it was limited to those who wanted to go through HomeKit’s often arduous approval process).
However, a smart home isn’t just about the devices you put in it. It’s about making them work together. That’s where Siri AI and Apple Intelligence could play an important role. While Apple used Gemini models to build Siri AI, Google itself has struggled to offer a compelling experience in the home. So Apple’s opportunity lies in execution. Its more careful approach to third-party hardware has held it back, but it also means Apple arrives at this pivotal moment with less technical debt and a cleaner foundation for building an AI-powered smart home.
This will be the next level for the smart home; With reliable data and context, your home could know who is in it, where they are and what they need and, combined with knowing the status of each device, become proactive. For example, it could alert you that the oven is on and no one is home, suggest turning off the air conditioning when a window is left open, and route messages and notifications to the room you are in.
A smart home is not just about the devices you put in it. It’s about making them work together
However, this is still a distant promise. Today, Apple Home has important limitations: it is not compatible with all types of home devices (not refrigerators, washing machines, or electric vehicle chargers); cannot control all functions of many types of devices; and their automations are limited compared to the competition (in particular, they lack conditional programming options within the app). All of this makes the Home app very easy to use, but very underpowered.
With Siri AI, Apple could unlock many of those capabilities through voice instead of creating complicated menu interfaces. You could simply tell Siri what you want your smart home to do. Alexa Plus offers this with the ability to create routines using your voice; Gemini for Home lets you use natural language in its Home app chatbot to set up automations; and many smart home companies are adopting AI in their applications to reduce UI complexity and make devices and features easier to use.
One big question remains: do people really want a smart home? Many of us have spent years frustrated with systems that show so much promise but routinely fail to deliver, leaving us to spend our weekends troubleshooting why the garage door won’t open. The truly dedicated have turned to Home Assistant, a powerful platform that can do almost anything you want, if you’re willing to do the work. But for most people, beyond a few solutions to specific problems, the smart home simply isn’t worth it.
Apple can’t do everything for the smart home, but it can make sure everything works with its platform.
To win in the smart home and popularize the category, Apple needs more than just great hardware; You need a superior software experience that makes your smart home easy to use. It must integrate seamlessly with third-party devices and offer a consistent, reliable experience, relying on local control wherever possible and ensuring that products simply work.
Apple is reportedly teaming up with LG and others to develop products for an “Apple Home Collection” that will add a layer of Apple shine to the smart home experience. While this may seem like a return to the walled garden of the HomeKit era, Matter ensures interoperability with other platforms. Apple can’t do everything for the smart home, but it can make sure everything works with its platform.
Most importantly, Apple will need to redouble its commitment to data privacy and security, especially as it paves the way for Apple Intelligence’s cloud-based capabilities. If Apple can deliver on all of this, its long-awaited smart home display could justify its price. But the real test will be whether Siri can make the smart home live up to its hype. promise.
