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Apple's 2026 Smart Home Revamp: All the Rumors
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I hope I'm wrong, but also, potentially... Ads! Hooray for ads! (NOT). Advertisers are bending over backwards to have your whole home lit up like Times Square. Perhaps we could have the Siri Google Gemini Aquarius home hub on the kitchen island facing the Samsung fridge with the screen, and they can see and talk to each other overnight for company. Maybe they could put a screen onto a Thermomix and add some arms so that all we have to do is put the ingredients into glass bowls and it does all the prep and cooking. What if the Apple home hub could ask the fridge if it has some eggs, milk, capsicum, ham, and spinach in stock so that the home hub can recommend a frittata or omelette for breakfastThis will be a device like the Amazon Echo Show 10, mostly intended to be voice-controlled, but with a touchscreen for more involved and precise operation when needed:
The rumored upcoming next-gen Google Nest Hub will likely be similar to that as well.
Ugh, the possibilities are endless! I need to lie down, it's all too exciting 😁
Think it will launch at $399. Looks like it will replace the standard HomePod. Waiting to see the new device. Hopefully Siri will be much better than it is now when it launches. Also waiting to see the new Apple security camera. Will be having all the privacy features and I think it will sell well.
Logitech has a few overpriced enterprise/business devices. My last job had what amounted to a wall-mounted soundbar + webcam combo. It was several thousands of dollars…
“Smarter more capable Siri.” I certainly hope so over the last couple of days dictating a text, Siri was incapable of picking the right form of two, too, or to in a sentence where the context should’ve been easy to figure out which one to use. Then another text I sent I use the word “would you,” but Siri came back with “Wood you.” yes for some reason it picks a capital W. And since I use Siri to dictate this post, it made the same mistakes again. If this is the future of AI, Apple is in serious trouble.
I have a lot of reservations adding unnecessary displays in my home. Some times I don’t need constant display in my home. Do I really need to see the outdoor temperature or cameras all the time? Same with fridges with displays I’m really not a fan. I have a few smart home devices but I’m pretty happy with my current setup (smart lock, garage, alarm, nest thermostat, 2 cameras).
Maybe it’s just me, but… another device, for what, exactly?
Why not integrate this into Apple TV and use it as an AI smart-home hub, accessible from my other devices like the iPad, which I can place wherever I need it? Why another box? Oh, right, shareholders over customers.
I’m almost sorry to say this as a long-time, laid-back Apple fan, but if I didn’t love my Mac Studio and macOS so much, 2025 would be the year I’d say no to these salami-slice releases and the “wow, the button looks different now” news. I’m tired
Why not integrate this into Apple TV and use it as an AI smart-home hub, accessible from my other devices like the iPad, which I can place wherever I need it? Why another box? Oh, right, shareholders over customers.
I’m almost sorry to say this as a long-time, laid-back Apple fan, but if I didn’t love my Mac Studio and macOS so much, 2025 would be the year I’d say no to these salami-slice releases and the “wow, the button looks different now” news. I’m tired
Only in the same way that "Google will run [Google's model] on its own Private Cloud Compute server with no information provided to Apple".
Very interesting I have 100’s of devices from hive lights, TRV’s, ring cameras and door bells etc etc as well but struggle with HomeKit Alexa seems to do a far better job maybe I am doing something wrong then
I have used google nest home products for a few years and looking to ditch them and would jump on this slightly quicker if the projected price were lower. You can set up a google home with a £90 hub, £100 -£200 cams etc a hub has some benefits as it creates a discrete network from the internet. I would love to see apple taking the security/privacy side further - using private relay etc. Sorry about the flavour of this old chestnut but: if only apple could have bought nest instead of google
my very limited use of HomeKit has not been great with Lifx lights.
You scan the QR code to add a light and it starts HomeKit.
And then you wait and often fail.
Then you wait 15 minutes for HomeKit to fall over and then you add the light to the Lifx app that lets you control a lot more than just on and off and basic colours.
My latest purchase, a Lifx Luna light, was much quicker and easier to set up.
Within a minute is was working.
And you can program physical buttons on the light to do things.
I can press one button and it will turn on/off other Matter enabled lights.
It sounds like a gimmick until you realise it's just quick and easy.
Hopefully future Lifx products will be more like this product.
You scan the QR code to add a light and it starts HomeKit.
And then you wait and often fail.
Then you wait 15 minutes for HomeKit to fall over and then you add the light to the Lifx app that lets you control a lot more than just on and off and basic colours.
My latest purchase, a Lifx Luna light, was much quicker and easier to set up.
Within a minute is was working.
And you can program physical buttons on the light to do things.
I can press one button and it will turn on/off other Matter enabled lights.
It sounds like a gimmick until you realise it's just quick and easy.
Hopefully future Lifx products will be more like this product.
mweh... I'd say use an iPad, even several older models could perfectly function as a control pad.
If Apple does want to make HomeKit run fully local, including camera storage... how about a new AppleTV with significant more storage or a Mac mini?
I mean a small Mac mini could do it all, including content caching.
If Apple does want to make HomeKit run fully local, including camera storage... how about a new AppleTV with significant more storage or a Mac mini?
I mean a small Mac mini could do it all, including content caching.
That's pretty optimistic! 🤣Looks like we finally gave up on ATV in 2025 not we are pushing the guess out to 2026.
I hope the ghost of Jony Ive is finally exorcised from the design of the HomePod line. It was super stupid to have the display on top of the speaker.
I don’t get why a speaker needs a complex display - a display may need a speaker, perhaps - the Homebase thing would be more about home automation than hifi anyway.
Personally, I’m still happy ( in general ) with 1st gen og homepods- but the output was slightly downgraded in gen 2… and honestly the design is pretty functional…
Oh man. While I realize it's a long shot, I really wish Apple would release a constellation of aesthetically pleasing home automation products, like what was lost as Google has incrementally stopped supporting Nest. I loved the design of my Nest Protect smoke detectors and Nest Secure alarm system. It was the most Apple-like in terms of industrial engineering (perhaps owing to Tony Fadell's contributions). All of the alternatives range from least ugly to horrible.
I have nearly perfect uptime. Siri can be a little sketchy, as people love to drone on and on about, but my trouble with Siri is when she can't hear me well and misinterprets what I said. In the context of HomeKit usage, if she hears me properly, she does the task fine.
Speech recognition is pretty good, but that is an area I hope Apple continuously improves. Especially as requests get more and more complex, as opposed to "Play" and "Stop" and "Next Song" like HomePods were originally kind of designed for.
Really, the only time anything is unavailable is if the battery is out or some device is updating. (Although even that is rare, because the HomePod's never seem to all update at once. So even when my designated home hub HomePod goes offline for an update, one of the others just takes over, and then they trade back and the other one updates.)
I've found having a rock solid WiFi network is critical. And to having as few WiFi smart devices as possible. Most WiFi routers just weren't really designed for tons of tiny low-data-rate devices, that's just not WiFi's best use case. Zigbee and Thread are much, much better for smart devices.
My air conditioners are all WiFi, and there is no way around that. And since each air handler has its own WiFi connection, that's 32 connections right there. Luckily they're all very stable. But that's already a lot, so I generally avoid any other WiFi smart devices when I have the choice.
Thread is basically just the newly revised Zigbee, created by the same people, with some substantial improvements. But still very similar, and still well suited to smart devices like sensors and light switches and outlets and buttons which just need to send a tiny blip of data every once in a while as opposed to WiFi which is designed to continuously transmit dumpster loads of data every millisecond so you can watch your 4k Netflix.
HomePods can be your Thread border router already, so you don't need anything. For Zigbee, a coordinator/hub that has a wired ethernet (or USB) connection is great.
Thread and Zigbee are both mesh networks, so the more devices you have that expand and fill out the mesh, the better and more resilient they are. For Zigbee, which is my primary device type right now, I used Zigbee light switches in every room to control the lights. Since the switches are hardwired to power and therefore signal repeaters, that means every battery powered end-device sensor is no farther away from signal than the light switch in its own room.
If you're well established with Alexa, certainly no reason to change. But HomeKit isn't inherently lacking on the software architecture side of things, so there's no reason to avoid it if someone was picking a system to use.
No, it would have to be battery powered and have the bio-metric authentication data stored on device, like the secure enclave.