- Apple’s smart home hub is reportedly due to launch later this year
- It’s not too late for Apple to set a new standard for smart home devices
- There are three key things Apple must do in order to succeed
There’s been a lot of speculation over the past few months about Apple’s plans to launch a home hub that combines a display with a speaker and lets you control various smart home devices in the vicinity. According to a new report, it’s on track to launch this year, but there are still some key questions surrounding the product.
The report comes from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who claims that Apple’s device will feature a seven-inch display that resembles a “smaller and cheaper iPad.” It will be used to “control appliances, conduct FaceTime chats, and handle other tasks,” Gurman says.
That might not sound like a groundbreaking new product, and Gurman himself describes it as “essentially a HomePod with a roughly 7-inch screen.” Yet the reporter believes it will also be “Apple’s most significant release of the year” because it will be a step towards the company establishing itself more strongly in the smart home market.
As well as that, Gurman says the device “provides another platform for AI features” and that Apple will follow it up with a more advanced product in a few years’ time. This high-end version will come with a robotic arm that will let the screen follow a user around the room.
What needs to happen
It’s encouraging to see Apple making moves in the smart home space, but the company has a lot of work to do in order to make its device competitive against rivals like Google and Amazon. For one thing, Apple needs to tune up its software, including HomeKit, Siri and Apple Intelligence, if it’s going to give users the kinds of experiences they can get from Apple’s competitors.
There’s also a lot of talk that Apple is going to debut a tailor-made operating system called homeOS with the home hub. If that’s true, this new system needs to have an intuitive, user-friendly interface to help people hit the ground running with this unfamiliar software environment. Fortunately, Apple is one of the best in the world at developing intuitive interfaces – now the company just needs to make sure it doesn’t drop the ball.
Thirdly, it’s vital that the home hub launches with a competitive price. Apple’s philosophy is to be the best, and that often leads to it adding premium features that command a high price – just look at how expensive the Vision Pro and the original HomePod were.
But Apple is late to the smart home party, so it needs to ensure it releases something that is genuinely strong without putting people off with an eye-watering price tag. It’s a fine line to tread, but the recently redesigned M4 Mac mini proves that it can be done. Based on the rumors, it seems likely that its price will sit somewhere between a HomePod Mini ($99 / £99 / AU$149, which it itself due to be getting a HomePod mini 2 successor this year) and a base iPad ($449 / £499 / AU$749), but that’s quite a big gap.
Will Apple be able to achieve all that with its home hub? That’s a question that we won’t have an answer for until the dust settles. But if any company has the resources to meet that challenge, it’s probably Apple.
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alexblake.techradar@gmail.com (Alex Blake)
